WiTHy A*: Winding-Constrained Motion Planning for Tethered Robot Using Hybrid A*

In this paper, a variant of hybrid A* is developed to find the shortest path for a curvature- constrained robot, that is tethered at its start posi- tion, such that the tether satisfies user-defined wind- ing angle constraints. A variant of tangent graphs is used as an underlying graph for searching a path using A∗in order to reduce the overall computa- tion and define appropriate cost metrics to ensure winding angle constraints are satisfied. Conditions are provided under which the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find a winding angle constrained path. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed algorithm are studied in simulation.