Navigation in a hazardous environment with distributed shelters

The problem of efficient path planning for a point robot in a partially known dynamic environment is considered. The static known part of the environment consists of point shelters distributed in planar terrain, and the dynamic, unknown part is abstracted in the form of alarms that cause the robot to leave its current (pre-planned) path and divert to the nearest shelter. A probabilistic analysis of the expected times for the dynamic paths generated when the alarms follow a Poisson distribution with parameter lambda is given. A case study with three shelters serves to illustrate the dependence of the expected travel times on lambda for two alternate static paths. Two different strategies are presented for the general case of n shelters and shown to be superior for different ranges of values of the alarm rate lambda (very low and very high values, respectively).<<ETX>>

[1]  Rajeev Sharma.  Safe motion planning for a robot in a dynamic, uncertain environment , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Micha Sharir,et al.  Motion Planning in the Presence of Moving Obstacles , 1985, FOCS.

[3]  John F. Canny,et al.  New lower bound techniques for robot motion planning problems , 1987, 28th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1987).

[4]  Nageswara S. V. Rao.  Algorithmic framework for learned robot navigation in unknown terrains , 1989, Computer.

[5]  Chee Yap,et al.  Algorithmic motion planning , 1987 .

[6]  R. Sharma,et al.  Dynamic control of motion detection by an active, mobile observer , 1991, Proceedings of the 1991 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control.

[7]  Hanan Samet,et al.  Motion planning in a dynamic domain , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[8]  Rajeev Sharma.  Locally efficient path planning in an uncertain, dynamic environment using a probabilistic model , 1992, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..