For navigation in complex environments, a robot needs to reach a compromise between the need for having efficient and optimized trajectories and the need for reacting to unexpected events. This paper presents a new sensor based Path Planner which results in a fast local or global motion planning able to incorporate the new obstacle information. In the first step the safest areas in the environment are extracted by means of a Voronoi Diagram. In the second step the Fast Marching Method is applied to the Voronoi extracted areas in order to obtain the path. The method combines map-based and sensor based planning operations to provide a reliable motion plan, while it operates at the sensor frequency. The main characteristics are speed and reliability, since the map dimensions are reduced to an almost unidimensional map and this map represents the safest areas in the environment for moving the robot.
In addition, the Voronoi Diagram can be calculated in open areas, and with all kind of shaped obstacles, which allows to apply the proposed planning method in complex environments where other methods of planning based on Voronoi do not work.