Combining harmonic functions and random sampling in robot motion planning:: A lazy approach

This paper presents a lazy procedure that enhances the performance of a robot motion. planning method, called PHM, that uses a potential-field approach based on harmonic functions together with a random sampling scheme. The harmonic functions used to guide the solution path arc, computed over a 2(d)-tree decomposition of a -dimensional Configuration Space that is obtained with probabilistic cell sampling. This paper proposes a lazy variant of the PHM planner that eliminates, reduces or delays as much as possible any time-consuming computation. The proposed approach, therefore, makes the planner computationally more efficient.