An efficient approach to 3D path planning.

Since the environmental complexity of a 3D environment significantly increases as compared to a 2D environment, previous studies on 3D path planning have mostly focused on efficiency in generating a 3D path. In this context, the present study proposes a method, COSPS (Critical Obstacles and Surrounding Point Set), which can lower the complexity for efficient 3D path planning by determining a subset of obstacles in terms of their importance for planning a path, and by finding a subset of grid points that can fully surround those obstacles in 3D. Due to this reduction of obstacles and points, a path can be efficiently generated, as a graph is constructed with a smaller number of points, rather than with the total number of points in 3D. To observe the effect of the proposed method on 3D path planning as compared to well-known methods that consider all obstacles and points, the simulation experiment was conducted for multiple 3D maps with different sizes, shapes, and distribution of obstacles. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can generate a feasible path and significantly enhance the efficiency of 3D path planning without compromising the quality of the solution in terms of path length.