SPITE: Simple Polyhedral Intersection Techniques for modified Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces SPITE, a geometric approach for efficiently updating configuration space graphs in dynamic environments, significantly improving update speed and reducing pre-processing time for motion planning tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel geometric method for transforming configuration space graphs into dynamic data structures that enable faster updates in changing environments.

Findings

Achieves 10-40% faster updates compared to previous methods.

Provides up to 60% faster motion planning queries.

Requires significantly less pre-processing time, from hours to minutes.

Abstract

Motion planning in modified environments is a challenging task, as it compounds the innate difficulty of the motion planning problem with a changing environment. This renders some algorithmic methods such as probabilistic roadmaps less viable, as nodes and edges may become invalid as a result of these changes. In this paper, we present a method of transforming any configuration space graph, such as a roadmap, to a dynamic data structure capable of updating the validity of its nodes and edges in response to discrete changes in obstacle positions. We use methods from computational geometry to compute 3D swept volume approximations of configuration space points and curves to achieve 10-40 percent faster updates and up to 60 percent faster motion planning queries than previous algorithms while requiring a significantly shorter pre-processing phase, requiring minutes instead of hours needed by the competing method to achieve somewhat similar update times.