Numerical potential field techniques for robot path planning

The authors investigate a path planning approach that consists of concurrently building and searching a graph connecting the local minima of a numerical potential field defined over the robot´s configuration space. They describe techniques for constructing ´good´ potentials and efficient methods for dealing with the local minima of these functions. These techniques have been implemented in fast planners that can deal with single and/or multiple robot systems with few and/or many degrees of freedom. Some experimental results with these planners are described.<>