Faster Motion Planning via Restarts

Abstract

Randomized methods such as PRM and RRT are widely used in motion planning. However, in some cases, their running-time suffers from inherent instability, leading to ``catastrophic'' performance even for relatively simple instances. We apply stochastic restart techniques, some of them new, for speeding up Las Vegas algorithms, that provide dramatic speedups in practice (a factor of $3$ [or larger] in many cases). Our experiments demonstrate that the new algorithms have faster runtimes, shorter paths, and greater gains from multi-threading (when compared with straightforward parallel implementation). We prove the optimality of the new variants. Our implementation is open source, available on github, and is easy to deploy and use.