Multi-resolution Field D*

Abstract

We present a multi-resolution path planner and replanner capable of efficiently generating paths across very large environments. Our approach extends recent work on interpolation-based planning to produce direct paths through non-uniform resolution grids. The resulting algorithm produces plans with costs almost exactly the same as those generated by the most effective uniform resolution grid-based approaches, while requiring only a fraction of their computation time and memory. In this paper we describe the algorithm and report results from a number of experiments involving both simulated and real field data.