Theta*: any-angle path planning on grids

  • Authors:

  • Alex Nash;Kenny Daniel;Sven Koenig;Ariel Feiner

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California;Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

  • Venue:
  • AAAI'07 Proceedings of the 22nd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Grids with blocked and unblocked cells are often used to represent terrain in computer games and robotics. However, paths formed by grid edges can be sub-optimal and unrealistic looking, since the possible headings are artificially constrained. We present Theta*, a variant of A*, that propagates informati on along grid edges without constraining the paths to grid edges. Theta* is simple, fast and finds short and realistic looking paths. We compare Theta* against both Field D*, the only other variant of A* that propagates information along grid edges without constraining the paths to grid edges, and A* with post-smoothed paths. Although neither path planning method is guaranteed to find shortest paths, we show experimentally that Theta* finds shorter and more realistic looking paths than either of these existing techniques.