On path planning: Adaptation to the environment using Fast Marching

This paper presents a novel methodology for fast path planning based on an offline predefined skeleton of the environment by means of the Fast Marching Square method. The FM² skeleton concept is introduced whose intuition is a set which contains the shortest paths (in terms of time) of a given environment This way, the path planning algorithm is adapted to the environment where a robot will navigate. An algorithm to obtain this skeleton is detailed in order to be able to use it for path planning purposes. When planning paths over the skeleton, the results show that the time reduction is about 50% while the characteristics of the FM² method remain: completeness, safeness, smoothness and absence of local minima. This paper also shows that the proposed method performs well in more than 2 dimensions.