SMARRT: Self-Repairing Motion-Reactive Anytime RRT for Dynamic Environments

Abstract: This paper addresses the fast replanning problem in dynamic environments with moving obstacles. Since for randomly moving obstacles the future states are unpredictable, the proposed method, called SMARRT, reacts to obstacle motions and revises the path in real-time based on the current interfering obstacle state (i.e., position and velocity). SMARRT is fast and efficient and performs collision checking only on the partial path segment close to the robot within a feasibility checking horizon. If the path is infeasible, then tree parts associated with the path inside the horizon are pruned while maintaining the maximal tree structure of already-explored regions. Then, a multi-resolution utility map is created to capture the environmental information used to compute the replanning utility for each cell on the multi-scale tiling. A hierarchical searching method is applied on the map to find the sampling cell efficiently. Finally, uniform samples are drawn within the sampling cell for fast replanning. The SMARRT method is validated via simulation runs, and the results are evaluated in comparison to four existing methods. The SMARRT method yields significant improvements in travel time, replanning time, and success rate compared against the existing methods.