Planning the Shortest Safe Path Amidst Unpredictably Moving Obstacles

In this paper we discuss the problem of planning safe paths amidst unpredictably moving obstacles in the plane. Given the initial positions and the maximal velocities of the moving obstacles, the regions that are possibly not collision-free are modeled by discs that grow over time. We present an approach to compute the shortest path between two points in the plane that avoids these growing discs. The generated paths are thus guaranteed to be collision-free with respect to the moving obstacles while being executed. We created a fast implementation that is capable of planning paths amidst many growing discs within milliseconds.