Version 1.0, August 31, 2001, Copyright, Hugh Jack 1993-2001
In a paper by T.Soetadji [1986] a method for 3D path planning by a mobile robot is suggested. The method is based upon use of an Oct-tree representation of 3D space. In the paper, the development of the Oct-Tree routines is discussed, and a robotic system for implementation is suggested. Once the Oct-tree is set up, an A* or a Breadth First search is used to find the best path for the mobile robot. This method finds the minimum distance (with collision avoidance) on a VAX 750. The search time for the path is on the order of 1 second. The tree structure also proves very efficient, because it had only occupied 1.7 MBytes of memory for a very complicated environment.