Questions on LaValle and Kuffner

Due February 5 at the beginning of class.

1) What does the symbol stand for? Why do we care about such regions for the purpose of path planning?

2) Figure 3 shows a "naive" random tree. Describe a) how this tree was generated, b) what's wrong with it from the motion planning perspective, and c) roughly how the naive algorithm is modified to produce an RRT. A brief, high-level answer for c is sufficient.

3) What does the EXTEND function do?

4) What is the drawback of bidirectional search?

5) In the analysis section, the authors state "the convergence rate is unfortunately expressed in terms of parameters that cannot be easily measured." What are these parameters, and why are they hard to measure?