Path planner for nonholonomic mobile robot with fast replanning procedure

This paper presents a new method of the path planning for robots with nonholonomic constraints in a partially known workspace. The method has been discussed for the car like robot with the three dimensional configuration space. The algorithm of the presented method is based on a A* graph searching with nodes placed in discretised configuration space. The graph generation process is driven by a heuristic cost which is found with the aid of a cost propagation procedure. This accelerates the searching without losing the optimality. The method presented is equipped with procedures of fast path replanning which is especially important for cases with partially known workspaces.