TY - JOUR AU - Harabor, Daniel AU - Grastien, Alban PY - 2011/08/04 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Online Graph Pruning for Pathfinding On Grid Maps JF - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence JA - AAAI VL - 25 IS - 1 SE - AAAI Technical Track: Robotics DO - 10.1609/aaai.v25i1.7994 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/7994 SP - 1114-1119 AB - <p> Pathfinding in uniform-cost grid environments is a problem commonly found in application areas such as robotics and video games. The state-of-the-art is dominated by hierarchical pathfinding algorithms which are fast and have small memory overheads but usually return suboptimal paths. In this paper we present a novel search strategy, specific to grids, which is fast, optimal and requires no memory overhead. Our algorithm can be described as a macro operator which identifies and selectively expands only certain nodes in a grid map which we call jump points. Intermediate nodes on a path connecting two jump points are never expanded. We prove that this approach always computes optimal solutions and then undertake a thorough empirical analysis, comparing our method with related works from the literature. We find that searching with jump points can speed up A* by an order of magnitude and more and report significant improvement over the current state of the art. </p> ER -