Robot motion planning for map building

Abstract

The goal of this work is to develop techniques that allow one or more robotic observers to operate with full autonomy while accomplishing the task of model building. The planning algorithm operates using certain simple but flexible models of the observer sensor and actuator abilities. We provide techniques that allow us to implement these sensor models on top of the capabilities of the actual (and off-the-shelf) sensors we have. It is worth keeping the following points in mind regarding our goals: 1) even with completely idealized sensing and mobility capabilities, the algorithmic task of model building is quite challenging; 2) computational techniques can be used to approximate and implement these idealized sensors on top of actual sensors; and 3) the quality and success of the generated plans depend significantly on the observer capabilities. The study of this dependency terms of high-level parameters describing the sensors is part of this work.