The Provable Virtue of Laziness in Motion Planning

The Lazy Shortest Path (LazySP) class consists of motion-planning algorithms that only evaluate edges along candidate shortest paths between the source and target. These algorithms were designed to minimize the number of edge evaluations in settings where edge evaluation dominates the running time of the algorithm such as manipulation in cluttered environments and planning for robots in surgical settings; but how close to optimal are LazySP algorithms in terms of this objective? Our main result is an analytical upper bound, in a probabilistic model, on the number of edge evaluations required by LazySP algorithms; a matching lower bound shows that these algorithms are asymptotically optimal in the worst case.