A Random Sampling-Based Method via Gaussian Process for Motion Planning in Dynamic Environments

Motion planning is widely applied to industrial robots, medical robots, bionic robots, and smart vehicles. Most work environments of robots are not static, which leads to difficulties for robot motion planning. We present a dynamic Gaussian local planner (DGLP) method to solve motion planning problems in dynamic environments. In a dynamic environment, dynamic obstacles sometimes make part of the global path invalid, so the local invalid path needs to be local re-planned online. Compared with the node sampling-based methods building large-scale random trees or roadmaps, the Gaussian random path sampling (GRPS) module integrated in the DGLP directly samples smooth random paths discretized into sparse nodes to improve the local path re-planning efficiency. We also provide the path end orientation constraint (PEOC) method for the local re-planning paths in order to merge them smoothly into the global paths. In the robot experiments, the average planning time of the DGLP is 0.04s, which is at least 92.31% faster than the test methods, and its comprehensive evaluation scores, which consider the consuming time, path quality, and success rate of local re-planning, are at least 44.92% higher than the test methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed DGLP method is able to efficiently provide high-quality local re-planning paths in dynamic environments.