Learning Combinatorial Information from Alignments of Landmarks

This paper characterizes the information space of a robot moving in the plane with limited sensing. The robot has a landmark detector, which provides the cyclic order of the landmarks around the robot, and it also has a touch sensor, that indicates when the robot is in contact with the environment boundary. The robot cannot measure any precise distances or angles, and does not have an odometer or a compass. We propose to characterize the information space associated with such robot through the swap cell decomposition. We show how to construct such decomposition through its dual, called the swap graph, using two kinds of feedback motion commands based on the landmarks sensed.