Path-Planning on a Spherical Surface with Disturbances and Exclusion Zones
Authors: Jonathan Smith, Samuel Hall, George Coombs, Harrison Abbot, Ayat Fekry, Michael A. S. Thorne, Derek Long, Maria Fox
JAIR 2025 | Venue PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Experimental | All of the results reported in this paper were generated on a 32 Gb Macbook Pro M2 Max laptop computer. A basic requirement of a path-planner on a spherical surface is that it closely approximates great circles in the absence of environmental features. Therefore, to begin the evaluation of our method, we compare the lengths of smoothed paths in unconstrained environments with the lengths of great circle arcs generated between the same pairs of waypoints. ... Figure 22 shows the error in path length, relative to the length of the great circle arc, that we accumulate using our approximation in different uniform mesh sizes. ... We conducted experiments in both an artificial environment and in the Baltic Sea. |
| Researcher Affiliation | Academia | Jonathan Smith EMAIL Samuel Hall EMAIL George Coombs EMAIL Harrison Abbot EMAIL Ayat Fekry EMAIL Michael A. S. Thorne EMAIL British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK Derek Long EMAIL King s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK Maria Fox EMAIL British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0EX, UK |
| Pseudocode | Yes | Algorithm 1: The Smoothing Algorithm. The inner loop is a sequence of function calls. ... Algorithm 8: Dijkstra s Algorithm for finding shortest path between a given start and end location in a graph. |
| Open Source Code | Yes | The methods and plots in this paper are provided in the route planning software Package Polar Route, version 0.5, found at: https://github.com/antarctica/Polar Route/releases/tag/v0.5 . |
| Open Datasets | Yes | Suitable datasets are available from a variety of GIS services2. Surface sea ice concentration and bathymetry3 are examples of scalar fields, while surface currents and winds are examples of vector fields. ... Geographical Information Systems Services include Copernicus, the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSDIC), the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). ... A bathymetric dataset such as GEBCO provides high resolution measurements of sea bed elevation (and hence depth of water). ... Both meshes are constructed using the elevation (global GEBCO) and sea ice concentration (HELMI) datasets used in the Ice Path Finder codebase as reported by Lehtola et al. (2019). |
| Dataset Splits | No | The paper does not provide traditional training/test/validation dataset splits, as it focuses on path planning methodology rather than machine learning model training. It describes the generation of random waypoints and artificial environments for evaluation purposes, but not data partitioning for model training. |
| Hardware Specification | Yes | All of the results reported in this paper were generated on a 32 Gb Macbook Pro M2 Max laptop computer. |
| Software Dependencies | No | The paper mentions its own software package, "Polar Route, version 0.5", but does not list specific version numbers for any ancillary software dependencies (e.g., programming languages, libraries, or solvers from other projects) used in the implementation. |
| Experiment Setup | Yes | We set a limit of 20,000 outer-loop path-smoothing iterations per path. ... We ran a PRM method with 2000, 5000, 10,000, 15,000 and 30,000 samples from a uniform distribution, and graph construction based on k-nearest neighbour with k = 30. ... The artificial environment is uniformly gridded at the resolution of 0.625 latitude by 1.25 longitude. ... all non-land cells are navigable at a uniform speed (set at 8 knots11 = 14.816 km/h for the purpose of these experiments). ... We consider meshes comprising cells of sizes 1 latitude by 1 longitude, 2 latitude by 2 longitude, 2.5 latitude by 5 longitude and 5 latitude by 5 longitude. |