Fast and almost optimal any-angle pathfinding using the 2^k neighborhoods

Any-angle path finding on grids is an important problem with applications in autonomous robot navigation. In this paper, we show that a well-known pre-processing technique, namely subgoal graphs, originally proposed for (non anyangle) 8-connected grids, can be straightforwardly adapted to the 2^k neighborhoods, a family of neighborhoods that allow an increasing number of movements (and angles) as k is increased. This observation yields a pathfinder that computes 2^k-optimal paths very quickly. Compared to ANYA, an optimal true any-angle planner, over a variety of benchmarks, our planner is one order of magnitude faster while being less than 0.0005% suboptimal. Important to our planner’s performance was the development of an iterative 2^k heuristic, linear in k, which is also a contribution of this paper.