On the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods

In this paper, we address the problem of optimal path planning to visit a set of regions by Dubins vehicle, which is also known as the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighborhoods (DTSPN). This problem can be tackled by a transformation to other variants of the TSP or evolutionary algorithms. We address the DTSPN as a problem to find Dubins path to visit a given sequence of regions and propose a simple iterative optimization procedure to find Dubins path visiting the regions. The proposed approach allows to efficiently solve the DTSPN and based on the presented comparison with existing approaches, the proposed algorithm provides solutions of competitive quality to the evolutionary techniques while it is significantly less computationally demanding.