Path planning through variational dynamic programming

This paper presents a novel approach to path planning. It is a variational technique, consisting of iteratively improving an initial path possibly colliding with obstacles. At each iteration, the path is improved by performing a dynamic programming search in a sub-manifold of the configuration space containing the current path. We call this method variational dynamic programming (VDP). The method can solve difficult high-dimensional path planning problems without using any problem-specific heuristics. More importantly, an extension of VDP can solve manipulator planning problems of unprecedented complexity