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High School Lab

Path Planner

Plan a collision-free route across a grid, then race your path against the shortest one possible.

Path Planner

A robot must reach its goal without driving through a wall. Build a route from Start to the Goal one tile at a time — then see how close you got to the shortest possible path.

Path length: 0. Click an open cell next to the glowing tile to extend it.

How does it actually work?

Motion planning is how a robot turns “get to the goal” into a concrete sequence of moves that never hits an obstacle. The world is modelled as a grid (or graph) of safe and unsafe positions.

Real robots do not hand-draw routes — they run a search algorithm. The shortest path shown here was found by breadth-first search, which explores outward from the start in rings until it reaches the goal, guaranteeing the fewest possible steps. Algorithms like A* add a sense of direction to make that search far faster.