Planning of optimal paths for autonomous agents moving in inhomogeneous environments

Long-range route planning is an important feature of autonomous agents guidance and control during out-door missions. Offline path planning for any manoeuvres in cluttered environments depends on the pre-mission knowledge about the topographical features of the landscape between the agent's start position and goal position. A topographical landscape consists of regions with different traversal costs, and it is not binary in nature (in terms of passable/impassable). For certain extraterrestrial or cross-country missions, where a lack of vehicular resources has to be handled, there is a strong need to calculate an optimal path according to a given optimization criterion. This paper presents an optical approach to find optimal paths in inhomogeneous environments, which follows from FERMAT's principle. It is derived from the beam propagation method, which is commonly used in optical research areas.