Sensory uncertainty field for mobile robot navigation

The authors introduce an approach to motion planning with uncertainty for mobile robots. Given a model of the robot's environment, a sensory uncertainty field (SUF) is computed over the robot's configuration space. At every configuration q, the SUF is an estimate of the uncertainty in the sensed configuration that would be computed by matching the data given by the robot sensors against the environment model, if the robot was at the configuration q. A planner then makes use of the computed SUF to generate paths that minimize the expected errors. The computation of a SUF is described for a classical line-striping camera/laser range sensor. An implemented SUF-based motion planner for a robot equipped with this sensor is presented.<<ETX>>