Efficiently biasing PRMs with passage potentials

This paper presents a passage potential based biasing scheme for PRMs to specifically address the narrow passage problem. The biasing strategy fulfills minimum requirements for an efficient biasing, considering not only location issues, but also intensity, sparseness and applicability of the biasing criterion. Conforming to these features a particular family of passage potential functions has been defined and integrated within a basic PRM to achieve biasing. Simulations have demonstrated the reliable and successful implementation of the proposed architecture under several experimental settings and robot configurations