The original concept of the artificial potential field in robot path planning has spawned a variety of extensions to address its main weakness, namely the formation of local minima in which the robot may be trapped. In this paper, a smooth navigation function combining the Dijkstra-based discrete static potential field evaluation with bilinear interpolation is proposed. The necessary modifications of the bilinear interpolation method are developed to make it applicable to the path-planning application. The effect is that the strategy makes it possible to solve the problem of the local minima, to generate smooth paths with moderate computational complexity, and at the same time, to largely preserve the product of the computationally intensive static plan. To cope with detected changes in the environment, a simple planning strategy is applied, bypassing the static plan with the solution of the A* algorithm to cope with dynamic discoveries. Results from several test environments are presented to illustrate the advantages of the developed navigation model.
Keywords: bilinear interpolation; dynamic local re-planning; path planning; potential field; robot navigation.