From Obstacle-Based Space Partitioning to Corridors and Path Planning. A Convex Lifting Approach

This letter proposes a novel methodology for path generation in known and congested multi-obstacle environments. Our aim is to solve an open problem in navigation within such environments: the feasible space partitioning in accordance with the distribution of obstacles. It is shown that such a partitioning is a key concept toward the generation of a corridor in cluttered environments. Once a corridor between an initial and a final position is generated, the selection of a path is considerably simplified in comparison with the methods which explore the original non-convex feasible regions of the environment. The core of the methodology presented here is the construction of a convex lifting which boils down to a convex optimization. This letter covers both the mathematical foundations and the computational details of the implementation and aims to illustrate the concepts with geometrical examples.