Mobile Robot Path Planning Among Weighted Regions Using Quadtree Representations

An approach to the mobile robot path planning among heterogeneous regions is presented. Proper weight factors are associated with the regions of different kind (rock, sand, grass) to characterize the amount of the difficulty required to travel through that particular region, as compared to traveling over a flat, smooth surface (corresponding to a minimum weight). The weighted regions are represented in the form of modified matrix quadtree. The technique of distance transform is extended to the weighted regions and applied to the robot path planning. Illustrative examples are included.