Voronoi diagram and fast marching applied to path planning

Abstract

This paper presents a new path planning method which operates in two steps. In the first step the safest areas in the environment are extracted by means of a Voronoi diagram. In the second step fast marching method is applied to the Voronoi extracted areas in order to obtain the shortest path. In this way the trajectory obtained is the shortest between the safe possible ones. This two step method combines speed and reliability, because the map dimensions is reduced to a unidimensional map and this map represents the safest areas in the environment for moving the robot