Potential information fields for mobile robot exploration

Abstract

We present a decision theoretic approach to mobile robot exploration. The method evaluates the reduction of joint path and map entropy and computes a potential information field in robot configuration space using these joint entropy reduction estimates. The exploration trajectory is computed descending on the gradient of these field. The technique uses Pose SLAM as its estimation backbone. Very efficient kernel convolution mechanisms are used to evaluate entropy reduction for each sensor ray, and for each possible robot orientation, taking frontiers and obstacles into account. In the end, the computation of this field on the entire configuration space is shown to be very efficient computationally. The approach is tested in simulations in a pair of publicly available datasets comparing favorably both in quality of estimates and in execution time against an RRT*-based search for the nearest frontier and also against a locally optimal exploration strategy.

Autonomous reconstruction of unknown indoor scenes guided by time-varying tensor fields

“…Most of these works, however, are not designed for smoothpath generation and thus the generated robot paths are not suitable for high quality scanning. The work ofVallve and Andrade-Cetto [2015] is the most related to ours. lt adopts aninformation-theoretic method to estimate guidance constraints, which are used to compute a potential field for path planning.…”

Path Planning in Structured Environment using Harmonic Potential Fields via Block Iterative Method

“…All ungroup nodes next to the boundary or obstacle cells are computed using direct method [21]. Furthermore, by adding a weighted parameter, ω, equation (12) can be rewritten as (13) Equation (13) represents the iterative scheme for Two Point-Block Successive Overrelaxation (2-BLSOR) method.…”

“…Moreover, they offer a complete path planning algorithm, and paths derived from them are generally smooth. In the past, an exact method based on the HPFs were applied in many area of researches including ship navigation [5], trajectory control [6], space robot path planning [7], navigation of snake-like robot [8], UAV motion planning [9], marine vessel path planning [10], 3D motion planning for UAV [11,12], space exploration [13], etc. In robot navigation problem, the HPFs were successfully applied in various types of environments [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Multi-robot Cooperative Systems for Exploration: Advances in Dealing with Constrained Communication Environments

“…The teams could be composed by IRobot or KheperaIII units. Artificial potential field approach could be used in order to conduct motion planning tasks [24], [4], [15]. The connectivity will be limited in range and bandwidth.…”