Artificial Intelligence

Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a plane that has convex polygonal obstacles as shown in Figure 3.31. This is an idealization of the problem that a robot has to solve to navigate in a crowded environment.

a. Suppose the state space consists of all positions (x, y) in the plane. How many states are there? How many paths are there to the goal?

b. Explain briefly why the shortest path from one polygon vertex to any other in the scene must consist of straight-line segments joining some of the vertices of the polygons. Define a good state space now. How large is this state space?

C. Implement a program using the following algorithm.

Figure 3.31 A scene with polygonal obstacles. S and G are the start and goal states