An efficient algorithm for finding a collision-free path among polyhedral obstacles

The use of graph search algorithms on a so called “visibility graph” is a common approach to finding a minimum-distance collision-free path among polyhedral obstacles in a 2D environment. Complexity of the search can be greatly reduced by reducing the size of the graph. The focus of this article is to provide an algorithm aimed at constructing a subvisibility graph using only “necessary” obstacles, i.e., excluding as many obstacles as possible whose vertices are never via points of the shortest collision-free path.

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