A morphological approach to shortest path planning for rotating objects

This paper presents a mathematical morphology based approach to find the shortest path of an arbitrarily shaped moving object with rotations amid obstacles of arbitrary shapes. By utilizing the proposed rotational morphology along with the continuous turning-angle constraint, the representation framework of the motion planning problem becomes simple and practical. Two vehicle models with different driving and turning systems are used in solving the path planning problem and their strategies are presented. Simulation results show that our algorithm works successfully in various conditions.