Overview of motion planning techniques and their suitability for an off-road navigation use-case

Motion planning for mobile robots involves defining set-points for their locomotion to reachable destinations, while taking into account the robot's dynamics and its interaction with the environment, which may be cluttered with rough terrain. Although the literature offers a wide range of strategies for this task, it remains difficult to get an overview of all available techniques and to choose the right approach for a given use-case. First, this article focuses on identification and classification of main families of motion planning techniques. Then, based on a vast selection of surveys, reviews, case-studies and articles, and through specifically selected criteria, a comparative study of these methods is proposed for the specific use-case of wheeled robots navigating in complex and uneven terrains.