Geometric algorithms for clearance based optimal path computation

In path planning, it is often more practical to evaluate the quality of a path not only on the basis of its length but also on the clearance from obstacles. In this paper, we propose computational geometry methods to compute the shortest path with a user-specified minimum clearance between two points in the plane in the presence of disjoint, simple, polygonal obstacles. The algorithm has time complexity O(nlogn) where n is a multiple of the number of obstacle vertices. By setting the minimum clearance to zero, we demonstrate that our algorithm can provide a high quality approximation of the shortest path between source and destination points.