ABSTRACT

This paper overviews the probabilistic roadmap ap­ proaches to path planning whose surprising practical performances attract today an increasing interest. We first comment on the configuration space topology in­ duced by the methods used to steer a mechanical sys­ tem. Topology induces the combinatorial complexity of the roadmaps tending to capture both coverage and con­ nectivity of the collision-free space. Then we introduce the notion of optimal coverage and we provide a paper probabilistic scheme in order to compute what we called visibility roadmaps [26]. Reading notes conclude on re­ cent results tending to better understand the behavior of these probabilistic path planning algorithms.