Motion planning is the task of finding a continuous, collision free, path for an robot (entity) through a workspace that may contains obstacle, or reporting that no such path exists.
Resources for Learning More
In his response to a now-deleted Stack Overflow question, Andrew Walker writes:
The most comprehensive text I know of in this area is Steven LaValle's "Planning Algorithms", which is available from http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/, as HTML and a PDF. Also included on the books webpage is a BibTeX file with more than a thousand references to the most significant literature in the field.
If you're looking for something a little more gentle, but no less comprehensive, you can check out the MIT Press book "Principle of Robot Motion Planning" by Choset, Lynch, Hutchinson, Kantor, Burgard, Kavraki and Thrun. Also of interest in robotics / sensing / motion planning is the excellent "Probabilistic Robotics" by Thrun, Burgard and Fox.
The classic text is "Robot Motion Planning" by Latombe, that has great coverage of the complete motion planning algorithms.
If you were looking for one place to start, I would have to recommend James Bruce's work on robocup and planning for autonomous systems, in particular his thesis "Real-Time Motion Planning and Safe Navigation in Dynamic Multi-Robot Environments" and the paper "Real-Time Randomized Path Planning for Robot Navigation". The work is presented in a way that makes it very approachable.
