Sliding-window informed RRT∗: A method for speeding up the optimization and path smoothing

Path planning plays a vital role in robot navigation and manipulation, and multiple types of algorithms have been introduced to address this problem. Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) based algorithms have many advantages over other path planning algorithms. For example, RRT is suitable to solve the path planning problem in high dimensional space and can easily handle robot differential constraints. Informed RRT∗ is a method that uses the prolate hyper-spheroid to speed up the optimization process, but its efficiency will decrease to the same level as RRT∗ when the hyper-spheroid covers most of the state space. To overcome this drawback, we further propose a Sliding-Window Informed RRT∗ (SWIRRT∗), which combines the sliding-window thought into the Informed RRT∗, taking the advantage of the initial path and make the path optimization much faster. Simulations in 2D space have been carried out to demonstrate that our proposed method can improve the RRT-like algorithm's convergence speed.