arXiv AI By Jatin Kumar Arora, Soutrik Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Sulania, Shubhendu Bhasin

Balancing Safety and Optimality in Robot Path Planning: Algorithm and Metric

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The paper introduces the Unified Path Planner (UPP), a graph‑search algorithm that balances safety and optimality by adaptively weighting heuristics and using a local inverse‑distance safety field. UPP auto‑tunes its parameters during search, guaranteeing suboptimality bounds while improving obstacle clearance. Evaluation on ten simulated environments shows UPP achieving a 0.94 OptiSafe score—significantly higher than existing methods—while adding only 0.5–1% to path length and maintaining a 100% success rate, with hardware validation on a TurtleBot confirming practical benefits.

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