If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Path planning in unknown or partly unknown environment is a quite complex task, partly because it is an evolving globally optimal path affected by the motion of the robot and the changing of environmental information. The purpose of this paper is to propose an online path planning approach for a mobile robot, which aims to provide a better adaptability to the motion of the robot and the changing of environmental information. Design/methodology/approach -This approach treats the globally optimal path as a changing state and estimates it online with two steps: prediction step, which predicts the globally optimal path based on the motion of the robot; and updating step, which uses the up-to-date environmental information to refine the prediction. Findings -Simulations and experiments show that this approach needs less time to reach the destination than some classical algorithms, provides speedy convergence and can adapt to unexpected obstacles or very limited prior environmental information. The better performances of this approach have been proved in both field and indoor environments. Originality/value -Compared with previous works, the paper's approach has three main contributions. First, it can reduce the time consumed in reaching the destination by adopting an online path planning strategy. Second, it can be applied in such environments as those with unexpected obstacles or with only limited prior environmental information. Third, both motion error of the robot and the changing of environmental information are considered, so that the global adaptability to them is improved.

As a fundamental capability of mobile robots, path planning highly relies on the accurate localization of the robot. However, limited consideration for the localizability (which describes the capability of acquiring accurate localization) has been made in path planning. This brings a high risk of choosing a path that is optimal but results in the robot easily getting lost. There exist two key challenges to address this problem: 1) How to evaluate the localizability of a path and its impact on path planning. 2) How to balance the localizability of a path and the standard path planning criteria (e.g., shortest travel distance, obstacle-free path, etc.. To overcome the two challenges a new path evaluation method is required. So we first analyzed the uncertainty that comes from dead-reckoning and map matching. Then the localizability was estimated by the fusion of the uncertainty coming from both of them. Based on that, the impact of the localizability on the path planning task has been evaluated by an evaluation function. By combining the localizability evaluation function with traditional criteria (e.g., shortest length, obstacle-free path, etc.), a new path evaluation function for path planning is established. Both simulation and experimental studies show that the new path evaluation function can offer a balance between the localizability and the traditional criteria for path planning.

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