UPP: Unified Path Planner with Adaptive Safety and Optimality

Abstract: We are surrounded by robots helping us perform complex tasks. Robots have a wide range of applications, from industrial automation to personalized assistance. However, with great technological innovation come significant challenges. One of the major challenges in robotics is path planning. Despite advancements such as graph search, sampling, and potential field methods, most path planning algorithms focus either on optimality or on safety. Very little research addresses both simultaneously. We propose a Unified Path Planner (UPP) that uses modified heuristics and a dynamic safety cost function to balance safety and optimality. The level of safety can be adjusted via tunable parameters, trading off against computational complexity. We demonstrate the planner's performance in simulations, showing how parameter variation affects results. UPP is compared with various traditional and safe-optimal planning algorithms across different scenarios. We also validate it on a TurtleBot, where the robot successfully finds safe and sub-optimal paths.