Tube RRT*: Efficient Homotopic Path Planning for Swarm Robotics Passing-Through Large-Scale Obstacle Environments

Recently, the concept of homotopic trajectory planning has emerged as a novel solution to navigation in largescale obstacle environments for swarm robotics, offering a wide ranging of applications.However, it lacks an efficient homotopic path planning method in large-scale obstacle environments.This paper introduces Tube RRT*, an innovative homotopic path planning method that builds upon and improves the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm.Tube RRT* is specifically designed to generate homotopic paths, strategically considering gap volume and path length to mitigate swarm congestion and ensure agile navigation.Through comprehensive simulations and experiments, the effectiveness of Tube RRT* is validated.