Dynamic-Domain RRTs: Efficient Exploration by Controlling the Sampling Domain

Sampling-based planners have solved difficult problems in many applications of motion planning in recent years. In particular, techniques based on the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have generated highly successful single-query planners. Even though RRTs work well on many problems, they have weaknesses which cause them to explore slowly when the sampling domain is not well adapted to the problem. In this paper we characterize these issues and propose a general framework for minimizing their effect. We develop and implement a simple new planner which shows significant improvement over existing RRT-based planners. In the worst cases, the performance appears to be only slightly worse in comparison to the original RRT, and for many problems it performs orders of magnitude better.