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This work considers a Motion Planning Problem with Dynamic Obstacles (MPDO) in 2D that requires finding a minimum-arrivaltime collision-free trajectory for a point robot between its start and goal locations amid dynamic obstacles moving along known trajectories. Existing methods, such as continuous Dijkstra paradigm, can find an optimal solution by restricting the shape of the obstacles or the motion of the robot, while this work makes no such assumptions. Other methods, such as search-based planners and sampling-based approaches can compute a feasible solution to this problem but do not provide approximation bounds. Since finding the optimum is challenging for MPDO, this paper develops a framework that can provide tight lower bounds to the optimum. These bounds act as proxies for the optimum which can then be used to bound the deviation of a feasible solution from the optimum. To accomplish this, we develop a framework that consists of (i) a bi-level discretization approach that converts the MPDO to a relaxed path planning problem, and (ii) an algorithm that can solve the relaxed problem to obtain lower bounds. We also present numerical results to corroborate the performance of the proposed framework. These results show that the bounds obtained by our approach for some instances are up to twice tighter than a baseline approach showcasing potential advantages of the proposed approach.
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This content will become publicly available on September 16, 2026
A* for Bounding Shortest Paths in the Graphs of Convex Sets
We present a novel algorithm that fuses the existing convex-programming based approach with heuristic information to find optimality guarantees and near-optimal paths for the Shortest Path Problem in the Graph of Convex Sets (SPP-GCS). Our method, inspired by A* initiates a best-first-like procedure from a designated subset of vertices and iteratively expands it until further growth is neither possible nor beneficial. Traditionally, obtaining solutions with bounds for an optimization problem involves solving a relaxation, modifying the relaxed solution to a feasible one, and then comparing the two solutions to establish bounds. However, for SPP-GCS, we demonstrate that reversing this process can be more advantageous, especially with Euclidean travel costs. In other words, we initially employ A* to find a feasible solution for SPP-GCS, then solve a convex relaxation restricted to the vertices explored by A* to obtain a relaxed solution, and finally, compare the solutions to derive bounds. We present numerical results to highlight the advantages of our algorithm over the existing approach in terms of the sizes of the convex programs solved and computation time.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120219
- PAR ID:
- 10640824
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2334-0835
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 260 to 268
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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