Reading that hurt my eyes.....Nonetheless, a very interesting. My current research pertains to differential topology with path planning in embedded systems, so this topic is very dear to me.
I found another pdf of the paper posted above that is easier on the eyes to read:
http://msl.cs.uiuc.edu/~lavalle/papers/LavKuf99.pdf
Has a team in the past implemented state space based machine control? If so, could you point me to where I could read about what they did?