Improved Soft Duplicate Detection in Search-Based Motion Planning

Search-based techniques have shown great success in motion planning problems such as robotic navigation by discretizing the state space and precomputing motion primitives. However in domains with complex dynamic constraints, constructing motion primitives in a discretized state space is non-trivial. This requires operating in continuous space which can be challenging for search-based planners as they can get stuck in local minima regions. Previous work [1] on planning in continuous spaces introduced soft duplicate detection which requires search to compute the duplicity of a state with respect to previously seen states to avoid exploring states that are likely to be duplicates, especially in local minima regions. They propose a simple metric utilizing the Euclidean distance between states, and proximity to obstacles to compute the duplicity. In this paper, we improve upon this metric by introducing a kinodynamically informed metric, subtree overlap, between two states as the similarity between their successors that can be reached within a fixed time horizon using kinodynamic motion primitives. This captures the intuition that, due to robot dynamics, duplicate states can be far in Euclidean distance and result in very similar successor states, while non-duplicate states can be close and result in widely different successors. Our approach computes the new metric offline for a given robot dynamics, and stores the subtree overlap value for all possible relative state configurations. During search, the planner uses these precomputed values to speed up duplicity computation, and achieves fast planning times in continuous spaces in addition to completeness and sub-optimality guarantees. Empirically, we show that our improved metric for soft duplicity detection in search-based planning outperforms previous approaches in terms of planning time, by a factor of 1.5 to 2× on 3D and 5D planning domains with highly constrained dynamics.