Motion Planning: Recent Developments H´ ector H. Gonz ´ alez-Ba˜ nos 1 , David Hsu 2 , Jean-Claude Latombe 3 1 Honda Research Institute USA Inc., USA hgonzalez@hra.com 2 Department of Computer Science National University of Singapore, Singapore dyhsu@comp.nus.edu.sg 3 Department of Computer Science Stanford University, USA latombe@cs.stanford.edu 1 Introduction A key trait of an autonomous robot is the ability to plan its own motion in order to accomplish specified tasks. Often, the objective of motion planning is to change the state of the world by computing a sequence of admissible motions for the robot. For example, in the path planning problem, we compute a collision-free path for a robot to go from an initial position to a goal position among static obstacles. This is the simplest type of motion planning problems; yet it is 1