  This work considers a Motion Planning Problem with Dynamic Obstacles (MPDO)
in 2D that requires finding a minimum-arrival-time collision-free trajectory
for a point robot between its start and goal locations amid dynamic obstacles
moving along known trajectories. Existing methods, such as continuous Dijkstra
paradigm, can find an optimal solution by restricting the shape of the
obstacles or the motion of the robot, while this work makes no such
assumptions. Other methods, such as search-based planners and sampling-based
approaches can compute a feasible solution to this problem but do not provide
approximation bounds. Since finding the optimum is challenging for MPDO, this
paper develops a framework that can provide tight lower bounds to the optimum.
These bounds act as proxies for the optimum which can then be used to bound the
deviation of a feasible solution from the optimum. To accomplish this, we
develop a framework that consists of (i) a bi-level discretization approach
that converts the MPDO to a relaxed path planning problem, and (ii) an
algorithm that can solve the relaxed problem to obtain lower bounds. We also
present numerical results to corroborate the performance of the proposed
framework. These results show that the bounds obtained by our approach for some
instances are up to twice tighter than a baseline approach showcasing potential
advantages of the proposed approach.

Robotics