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arXiv · 2504.05921

Accelerated Reeds-Shepp and Under-Specified Reeds-Shepp Algorithms for Mobile Robot Path Planning

Ibrahim Ibrahim·Wilm Decré·Jan Swevers
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Abstract

In this study, we present a simple and intuitive method for accelerating optimal Reeds-Shepp path computation. Our approach uses geometrical reasoning to analyze the behavior of optimal paths, resulting in a new partitioning of the state space and a further reduction in the minimal set of viable paths. We revisit and reimplement classic methodologies from the literature, which lack contemporary open-source implementations, to serve as benchmarks for evaluating our method. Additionally, we address the under-specified Reeds-Shepp planning problem where the final orientation is unspecified. We perform exhaustive experiments to validate our solutions. Compared to the modern C++ implementation of the original Reeds-Shepp solution in the Open Motion Planning Library, our method demonstrates a 15x speedup, while classic methods achieve a 5.79x speedup. Both approaches exhibit machine-precision differences in path lengths compared to the original solution. We release our proposed C++ implementations for both the accelerated and under-specified Reeds-Shepp problems as open-source code.

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Ibrahim Ibrahim, Wilm Decré, Jan Swevers. 2025-08-13. Accelerated Reeds-Shepp and Under-Specified Reeds-Shepp Algorithms for Mobile Robot Path Planning. https://doi.org/10.1109/tro.2025.3554406

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