New path planning algorithm based on the visibility checking using a quad-tree on a quantized space, and its improvements

In this paper, we introduce a new path planning algorithm which combines the merits of a visibility graph algorithm and an adaptive cell decomposition. We quantize a given map with empty cells, blocked cells, and mixed cells, then find the optimal path on the quantized map using a visibility graph algorithm. For reducing the number of the quantized cells we use the quad-tree technique which is used in an adaptive cell decomposition, and for improving the performance of the visibility checking in making a visibility graph we propose a new visibility checking method which uses the property of the quad-tree instead of the well-known rotational sweep-line algorithm. For the more efficient visibility checking, we propose two additional improvements for our suggested method. Both of them are used for reducing the visited cells in the quad-tree. The experiments for a performance comparison of our algorithm with other well-known algorithms show that our proposed method is superior to others.