Systematic Literature Review of Sampling Process in Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 50933 - 50953
• Main Authors: Veras, Luiz Gustavo D. O., Medeiros, Felipe L. L., Guimaraes, Lamartine N. F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aerospace electronics; Algorithms; Autonomous navigation; Collision avoidance; Computer graphics; Data structures; informed sampling; Literature reviews; Non-uniform sampling; Path planning; Planning; Protocols; Random sampling; Robotics; Robots; RRT; Search problems; Searching; Spatial distribution; systematic literature review; Systematic review; Systematics
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2908100

Path planning is one of the most important process on applications such as navigating autonomous vehicles, computer graphics, game development, robotics, and protein folding. It ensures that a path is planned between an initial and final position on the collision-free region of a search space if one exists. One of the most wide algorithms used for this purpose is the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT), in which each node of a tree data structure is generated from a search space by a random sampling process, which originally follows a uniform spatial distribution. However, some authors claim that the addition of a non-uniform/informed approach into the sampling process of the RRT could accelerate the planning time of the algorithm. Actually, many works on literature propose different strategies to include non-uniform/informed behavior on RRT-based algorithms. However, the large number of studies on path planning subject impose difficulties on the identification of new solutions on a review process. The aim of this paper is to structure a review process to deal with the massive volume of works on this subject, by presenting the planning, development, and results of a systematic literature review (SLR), to investigate non-uniform/informed sampling solutions applied to RRT-based algorithms on path planning literature. A review protocol with two scientific questions was developed to guide the investigation. As a result, 1136 studies were selected in the path planning literature, of which 53 were identified as claiming to contain a solution with non-uniform/informed sampling on RRT-based algorithms. As a specific work is considered a scientific contribution only when it has not yet been explored in scientific circles, the results of the SLR can be used as a tool to search for what has not yet been proposed, helping to identify opportunities to contribute with new sampling processes of RRT-based algorithms. To the best knowledge of the authors, this paper presents the first development of an SLR of a topic related to the RRT algorithm.