Planning using a Network of Reusable Paths: A Physical Embodiment of a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree

Growing a network of reusable paths is a novel approach to navigation that allows a mobile robot to autonomously seek distant goals in unmapped, GPS-denied environments, which may make it particularly well-suited to rovers used for planetary exploration. A network of reusable paths is an extension to visual-teach-and-repeat systems; instead of a simple chain of poses, there is an arbitrary network. This allows the robot to return to any pose it has previously visited, and it lets a robot plan to reuse previous paths. This paradigm results in closer goal acquisition (through reduced localization error) and a more robust approach to exploration with a mobile robot. It also allows a rover to return a sample to an ascent vehicle with a single command. We show that our network-of-reusable-paths approach is a physical embodiment of the popular rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) planner. Simulation results are presented along with the results from two different robotic test systems. These test systems drove over 14 km in planetary analog environments.

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