Planning a time-minimal motion among moving obstacles

Motion planning for a point robot is studied in a time-varying environment. Each obstacle is a convex polygon that moves in a fixed direction at a constant speed. The point to be reached (referred to as the destination point) also moves along a known trajectory. The concept of “accessibility” from a point to a moving object is introduced, and is used to define a graph on a set of moving obstacles. If the point robot is able to move faster than any of the obstacles, then the graph exhibits an important property: a time-minimal motion is given as a sequence of edges in the graph. An algorithm is described for generating a time-minimal motion and its execution time is analyzed.

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