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Main Authors: Talia, Sidharth, Salzman, Oren, Srinivasa, Siddhartha
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30647
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author Talia, Sidharth
Salzman, Oren
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
author_facet Talia, Sidharth
Salzman, Oren
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
contents We focus on the problem of efficient anytime kinodynamic planning for systems with complex dynamics in unstructured environments that make precomputing motion primitives infeasible. Directly applying A* to such problems is computationally infeasible due to the curse of dimensionality. Methods such as Hybrid A* addressed this burden by discretizing the state space, but in turn creating a coupling between tree discovery and the discretization resolution. The Incremental Generalized Hybrid A* (IGHA*) performs search over a hierarchy of resolutions in an anytime fashion to break this coupling, by freezing vertices to use in later search iterations rather than pruning them. However, the frozen vertices can hide solution-supporting vertices from the search at a particular iteration. While classical bidirectional search is motivated by the reduction of search depth, extending IGHA* into the bidirectional setting (termed Bi-IGHA*) obtains additional benefit by fundamentally mitigating the behaviour induced by frozen vertices hiding solutions. We show that Bi-IGHA* preserves IGHA*'s guarantees on monotonic cost improvement and termination. We empirically show that Bi-IGHA* substantially reduces expansions on R3, R4, and R6 planning problems, and achieves equivalent closed-loop performance with kinodynamic planning for high-speed off-road autonomy while requiring significantly fewer expansions. Website: https://personalrobotics.github.io/IGHAStar/biighastar.html
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30647
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bidirectional Incremental Generalized Hybrid A*
Talia, Sidharth
Salzman, Oren
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
Robotics
We focus on the problem of efficient anytime kinodynamic planning for systems with complex dynamics in unstructured environments that make precomputing motion primitives infeasible. Directly applying A* to such problems is computationally infeasible due to the curse of dimensionality. Methods such as Hybrid A* addressed this burden by discretizing the state space, but in turn creating a coupling between tree discovery and the discretization resolution. The Incremental Generalized Hybrid A* (IGHA*) performs search over a hierarchy of resolutions in an anytime fashion to break this coupling, by freezing vertices to use in later search iterations rather than pruning them. However, the frozen vertices can hide solution-supporting vertices from the search at a particular iteration. While classical bidirectional search is motivated by the reduction of search depth, extending IGHA* into the bidirectional setting (termed Bi-IGHA*) obtains additional benefit by fundamentally mitigating the behaviour induced by frozen vertices hiding solutions. We show that Bi-IGHA* preserves IGHA*'s guarantees on monotonic cost improvement and termination. We empirically show that Bi-IGHA* substantially reduces expansions on R3, R4, and R6 planning problems, and achieves equivalent closed-loop performance with kinodynamic planning for high-speed off-road autonomy while requiring significantly fewer expansions. Website: https://personalrobotics.github.io/IGHAStar/biighastar.html
title Bidirectional Incremental Generalized Hybrid A*
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30647