Comparison of A and RRT-Connect Motion Planning Techniques for Self-Reconfiguration Planning

This paper presents a comparison between two different algorithms for self-reconfiguration planning on modular self-reconfigurable robots. The two algorithms are A* and RRT-Connect. A* has often been used for self-reconfiguration planning on different systems, but so far no work has been done to show that A* is an optimal or even a good choice for this task. The RRT-connect algorithm is adopted from traditional robot motion planning and is easily adapted to self-reconfiguration planning. The results show that RRT-connect is significantly faster than A* for difficult self-reconfiguration problems. In most cases RRT-connect generates longer paths that A* it is, however, possible to optimize the paths from RRT-connect by a simple and efficient method such that the difference is negligible