Experimental Comparison of Global Motion Planning Algorithms for Wheeled Mobile Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source benchmark for comparing global motion planning algorithms for wheeled mobile robots, using realistic scenarios and metrics to evaluate efficiency and path quality.

Contribution

It presents a new benchmark tool for evaluating motion planners in realistic scenarios, facilitating comparison and analysis of various algorithms.

Findings

Identified strengths and weaknesses of common motion planners.

Provided recommendations for selecting appropriate algorithms.

Benchmark is easy to extend and use for future research.

Abstract

Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer functions and path-improvement techniques have been proposed for such non-holonomic systems. With the objective of comparing this large assortment of state-of-the-art motion-planning techniques, we introduce a novel open-source motion-planning benchmark for wheeled mobile robots, whose scenarios resemble real-world applications (such as navigating warehouses, moving in cluttered cities or parking), and propose metrics for planning efficiency and path quality. Our benchmark is easy to use and extend, and thus allows practitioners and researchers to evaluate new motion-planning algorithms, scenarios and metrics easily. We use our benchmark to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of several common state-of-the-art motion planners and provide recommendations on when they should be used.