ABSTRACT
Both robotic manipulator arm trajectory and mobile robot path planning can be cast as point trajectory planning in a Euclidean space of as many dimensions as the degrees of freedom of the robotic device. The A* Search strategy is a general tree search procedure with a number of interesting properties. It appears in Nilsson’s text of 1971. Lozano Perez and Wesley showed how to apply A* Search to robot path planning in convex polygonal obstacle fields to extract the minimal length collision-free path from a nominated start point to a nominated goal point, both being assumed to be in free space. The A* algorithm is a strategy for exploring paths through nodes (vertices) associated with the least estimated cost of reaching the goal. This cost estimate is made up of two parts, the known cost of reaching a node under examination from the start point and the estimated cost of reaching the goal from the node.
