Synergistic exploration and navigation of mobile robots under pose uncertainty in unknown environments

Abstract

Path planning under uncertainty in an unknown environment is an arduous task as the resulting map has inaccuracies and a safe path cannot always be found. A path planning method is proposed in unknown environments towards a known target position and under pose uncertainty. A limited range and limited field of view range sensor is considered and the robot pose can be inferred within certain bounds. Based on the sensor measurements a modified map is created to be used for the exploration and path planning processes, taking into account the uncertainty via the calculation of the guaranteed visibility and guaranteed sensed area, where safe navigation can be ensured regardless of the pose-error. A switching navigation function is used to initially explore the space towards the target position, and afterwards, when the target is discovered to navigate the robot towards it. Simulation results highlighting the efficiency of the proposed scheme are presented.

Look before you sweep: Visibility-aware motion planning

“…Exploration problems generally assume no prior knowledge of the obstacles and desire that the robot eventually observe all parts of the space, possibly while building a map of the obstacles [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Navigation problems seek to reach a specified goal region in an incompletely known environment [11,12,13].…”

“…the arms may partially block the sensor; this setting motivates our work although our experiments are in lower dimensions. Previous work has considered a variety of motion models: kinematic, whether holonomic or non-holonomic [9], or kino-dynamic [11,16], and with deterministic or noisy actuation [10,12]. Robot dynamics introduce additional difficulty because the robot is not able to stop instantly when an obstacle is detected; instead, it must ensure that it never enters an inevitable collision state(ics) [11,9] with respect to its current known free space and a motion model of possible obstacles.…”

Water cycle algorithm: an approach for improvement of navigational strategy of multiple humanoid robots

“…Singh et al [33] proposed A* approach for navigation of unmanned surface vehicles in complex environments with dynamic obstacles and ocean currents. Arvanitakis et al [34] developed a new path planning technique by considering range sensor and robot pose with calculation of guaranteed visibility with sensed area for safe navigation of mobile robots in unknown environments.…”

Distributed control of mobile robots in an environment with static obstacles

“…This is of no surprise as the idea of deploying a decentralised group of robots, working in collaboration by distributing information, is very enticing and has many applications. Some of the most popular tasks for swarm robotics are: moving while preserving a formation [1][2][3], exploration and mapping of an unknown region [4][5][6][7], and foraging [8][9][10], where the robots have to find and transport objects to specific locations.…”