Path planning with divergence-based distance functions

DOI10.1016/J.CAGD.2018.09.002MaRDI QIDQ668992zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Renjie Chen, Craig Gotsman, Kai Hormann

Publication date 20 March 2019

Published in Computer Aided Geometric Design (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02845

divergence distance function path planning potential function

Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects) (68U05) Numerical aspects of computer graphics, image analysis, and computational geometry (65D18)

Abstract: Distance functions between points in a domain are sometimes used to automatically plan a gradient-descent path towards a given target point in the domain, avoiding obstacles that may be present. A key requirement from such distance functions is the absence of spurious local minima, which may foil such an approach, and this has led to the common use of harmonic potential functions. Based on the planar Laplace operator, the potential function guarantees the absence of spurious minima, but is well known to be slow to numerically compute and prone to numerical precision issues. To alleviate the first of these problems, we propose a family of novel divergence distances. These are based on f-divergence of the Poisson kernel of the domain. We define the divergence distances and compare them to the harmonic potential function and other related distance functions. Our first result is theoretical: We show that the family of divergence distances are equivalent to the harmonic potential function on simply-connected domains, namely generate paths which are identical to those generated by the potential function. The proof is based on the concept of conformal invariance. Our other results are more practical and relate to two special cases of divergence distances, one based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence and one based on the total variation divergence. We show that using divergence distances instead of the potential function and other distances has a significant computational advantage, as, following a pre-processing stage, they may be computed up to an order of magnitude faster than the others when taking advantage of certain sparsity properties of the Poisson kernel. Furthermore, the computation is "embarrassingly parallel", so may be implemented on a GPU with up to three orders of magnitude speedup.

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