| Volume 26 Issue 10 - Publication Date: 1 September 2007 |
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| Extending the Path-Planning Horizon |
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| B. Nabbe Tandent Vision Science, Inc.
San Francisco CA 94111 and M. Hebert The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213 |
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| The mobility sensors on a typical mobile robot vehicle have limited
range. Therefore a navigation system has no knowledge about the
world beyond this sensing horizon. As a result, path planners that
rely only on this knowledge to compute paths are unable to anticipate
obstacles sufficiently early and have no choice but to resort to an
inefficient local obstacle avoidance behavior.
To alleviate this problem, we present an opportunistic navigation
and view planning strategy that incorporates look-ahead sensing of
possible obstacle configurations. This planning strategy is based on
a “what-if” analysis of hypothetical future configurations of the environment.
Candidate sensing positions are evaluated based on their
ability to observe anticipated obstacles. These sensing positions identified
by this forward-simulation framework are used by the planner
as intermediate waypoints. The validity of the strategy is supported by
results from simulations as well as field experiments with a real robotic
platform. These results show that significant reduction in path
length can be achieved by using this framework. |
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