An incremental learning approach to motion planning with roadmap management

Traditional approaches to the motion-planning problem can be classified into single-query and multiple-query problems with the tradeoffs on run-time computation cost and adaptability to environment changes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the problem that can learn incrementally on every planning query and effectively manage the learned roadmap as the process goes on. This planner is based on previous work on probabilistic roadmaps and uses a data structure, called reconfigurable random forest (RRF), which extends the rapidly-exploring random tree structure proposed in the literature. The planner can account for environmental changes while keeping the size of the roadmap small. The planner removes invalid nodes in the roadmap as the obstacle configurations change. It also uses a tree-pruning algorithm to trim RRF into a more concise representation. Our experiments show that the planner is flexible and efficient.