A new method to generate shortest collision-free paths for mobile robots

In this paper, Bi-road Method (BRM) is proposed as a new path planning method to generate the shortest collision-free path with consideration of safety from the given start point to goal point for mobile robots working in the static and known 2D environment. While BRM shares the beneficial properties of existing path planning methods based on constructing graph, BRM can guarantee outputting the shortest collision-free path between two given points. Furthermore, BRM is purely complete (in our thought, a planner is purely complete if the planner outputs the correct path as long as there exists free space connected between two points, otherwise declares failure). Simulation results of comparison with MAKLINK graph verify the nice properties of Bi-road Method proposed in this paper.