Theory and Algorithms Commons^™

Enhancements To Hierarchical Pathfinding Algorithms, Xin Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis we study the problem of pathfinding in static grid-based maps. We apply the approach of abstraction and refinement. We abstract the grid map into a graph representation, and use the classic A* algorithm to search for a path in the abstract space, and then refine it into low-level path.

We started with a 2013 entry program to the Grid-based Path Planning Competition, and implemented several enhancements to experiment with the tradeoff between memory usage and search speed. Our program returns the refined low-level path incrementally, therefore reduces the first-move lag in large maps. We cache the low-level …