Where can I find information on the D* or D* Lite pathfinding algorithm?

Question

There are links to some papers on D* here, but they're a bit too mathematical for me. Is there any information on D*/D* Lite more geared towards beginners?

Answer 1

Wikipedia has an article on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*

Also a D* Lite implementation in C is available from Sven Koenig's page: http://idm-lab.org/code/dstarlite.tar However I find the impenetrable math much easier to read than the C source code ;-)

Another implementation of D* Lite (in C++) is available here: http://code.google.com/p/dstarlite/

Answer 2

Well if pseudo code is hard for you (you don't have to read theorems and proofs - pseudo code is pretty straight forward if you know standard algorhitms) and you complain against published C and C++ code then I guess you'll need to go doing something else :-)

Seriously, don't expect that someone can teach you a top grade algorithm in a few web paragraphs. Take a pen and paper and write, draw and follow on paper what's going on. You may have to read something twice and google one or two references to get to know a few concepts around it, and there's no need to dig in the theorems and proofs at all - unless you hope to prove the author wrong that is :-))

Can't go forward without some more math - c'est la vie. Imagine that you asked someone to teach you what on earth is matrix inversion but you don't know what are vectors. No one could help you till you learned enough of the math context first.