207. Bidirectional Variable Probability RRT Algorithm for Robotic Path Planning

The traditional goal-bias RRT is mentioned to improve the efficiency, but it has an inherent problem, when there are lesser vertexes, the search toward the goal is often invalid; however, when there are more vertexes, the search toward other regions is often unnecessary. To solve this problem, we introduce a kind bidirectional variable probability RRT algorithm. In this paper, we build two trees, and one tree expands toward to the other tree at a variable probability. This probability is in proportion to the coverage of the trees, that is, when there are lesser vertexes, the searches are mainly toward unexplored regions, and when there are more vertexes, we attach more importance to the connection of two trees. The results show the good performance and convergence speed of the proposed algorithm.