WiTHy A*: Winding-Constrained Motion Planning for Tethered Robot using Hybrid A*

In this paper, a variant of hybrid A* is developed to find the shortest path for a curvature-constrained robot, that is tethered at its start position, such that the tether satisfies user-defined winding angle constraints. A variant of tangent graphs is used as an underlying graph for searching a path using A* in order to reduce the overall computation and define appropriate cost metrics to ensure winding angle constraints are satisfied. Conditions are provided under which the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find a winding angle constrained path. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed algorithm are studied in simulation.