{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-efficient-semi-real-time-algorithm-for","title":"An Efficient Semi-Real-Time Algorithm for Path Planning in the Hamilton-Jacobi Formulation","arxiv_id":"2309.02357","date":"2023-09-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Christian Parkinson","Kyle Polage"],"abstract":"We present a semi-real-time algorithm for minimal-time optimal path planning based on optimal control theory, dynamic programming, and Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equations. Partial differential equation (PDE) based optimal path planning methods are well-established in the literature, and provide an interpretable alternative to black-box machine learning algorithms. However, due to the computational burden of grid-based PDE solvers, many previous methods do not scale well to high dimensional problems and are not applicable in real-time scenarios even for low dimensional problems. We present a semi-real-time algorithm for optimal path planning in the HJ formulation, using grid-free numerical methods based on Hopf-Lax formulas. In doing so, we retain the intepretablity of PDE based path planning, but because the numerical method is grid-free, it is efficient and does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, and thus can be applied in semi-real-time and account for realistic concerns like obstacle discovery. This represents a significant step in averting the tradeoff between interpretability and efficiency. We present the algorithm with application to synthetic examples of isotropic motion planning in two-dimensions, though with slight adjustments, it could be applied to many other problems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02357v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02357v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-efficient-semi-real-time-algorithm-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/chparkin/SRT_HJ_Alg","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}