Path planning and environment understanding based on distributed sensing in distributed autonomous robotic system

Abstract

This paper deals with the cooperative distributed sensing of a distributed autonomous robotic system (DARS) for unknown or partially known environment, and its application to path planning and environment representation. The basic problem to get optimal path and exact environmental representation for robots in unknown or partially known or dynamic environments is concerned with the robot sensing these environments. Because of the characteristics of sensing information in DARS-distributed in time-space-function, we propose that it is practical for each robot in DARS to use (integrate) sensing information of other robots for planning and reasoning so as to compensate the lack of a single robot's sensing capability. Through our simulations and experiments, the fact that the efficiency of path planning and map building in DARS are evidently raised based on proposed approach is shown.