CAREER/REU: Complete Sensor Based Planning for Highly Articulated Robots

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The realistic deployment of highly articulated robots relies on a provably complete sensor based planner for these robots. Consequently, the operation of such robots motivates the long- term research effort to develop a sensor based planner for a broad class of highly articulated robots. The research considers the next step towards this goal: this approach introduces a new roadmap structure for an arbitrary shaped object. The roadmap is termed the hierarchical configuration Voronoi graph (HCVG) and it can be used to plan a path between two points and to explore and map an environment. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the HCVG applies to situations where the robot has no a priori information about its environment and thus, the robot must rely on its sensor information to achieve its goal. A powerful feature of the HCVG is its incremental construction procedure, which is a necessary component of a sensor based planner because there typically is no one vantage point from where the robot can ``see'' the entire environment; the robot needs to couple sensing with motion. Four key aspects of this ppocedure are (1) it uses only line of sight distance information, (2) it requires minimal sensor processing, (3) it need not explicitly compute the configuration space of the robot, and (4) it is complete. This incremental construction procedure is general to any roadmap method and thus provides a framework in how local line of sight information can be used to create a global map. This award is coordinated with a companion award from the Office of Naval Research in support of this research.