Hierarchical A? based path planning  a case study
Usually it is impossible to know in advance how coarsely robot movements can be discretized in order to find a collision-free path from an initial robot position to a desired goal position in a presence of obstacles. Our solution to the problem is to introduce a new method of constructing hierarchical path planning algorithms. It is based on a novel application of the A? control strategy, called here Meta A?. We test four hierarchical path planning algorithms, two of which are based on Meta A?, using five simulated robot workcells. The simulations suggest that the Meta A? based planners, on average, find paths faster and consume less memory than the other two algorithms.
a? heuristic search robot point-to-point path planning resource allocation