Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 4: Motion Planning, RRT Samples Its Way Through Continuous Space
The second half of 07-380 Lec4 moves planning into continuous configuration space. States can no longer be enumerated, so RRT samples a random point, extends the nearest tree node a short step toward it, and checks the whole segment for collisions. RRT is probabilistically complete but not optimal; RRT* uses tree path costs to pick a better parent and rewire neighbors, so the path converges to optimal as samples grow.