A Dynamic Path Planning Method for Social Robots in the Home Environment

The home environment is a typical dynamic environment with moveable obstacles. The social robots working in home need to search for feasible paths in this complex dynamic environment. In this work, we propose an improved RRT algorithm to plan feasible path in home environment. The algorithm pre-builds a tree that covers the whole map and maintains the effectiveness of all nodes with branch pruning, reconnection, and regrowth process. The method forms a path by searching the nearest node in the tree and then quickly accessing the nodes near the destination. Due to the effectiveness-maintaining process, the proposed method can effectively deal with the complex dynamic environment where the destination and multiple moving obstacles change simultaneously. In addition, our method can be extended to the path-planning problem in 3D space. The simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.