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

高关节机器人的实际部署依赖于一个可证明完整的基于传感器的机器人规划。因此，这种机器人的操作激励了长期的研究工作，为广泛的高关节机器人开发基于传感器的规划器。该研究考虑了实现这一目标的下一步：该方法为任意形状的物体引入了一种新的路线图结构。该路线图被称为分层配置Voronoi图（HCVG），它可用于规划两点之间的路径，并探索和映射环境。此外，也许更重要的是，HCVG适用于机器人对其环境没有先验信息的情况，因此，机器人必须依靠其传感器信息来实现其目标。HCVG的一个强大功能是它的增量构建过程，这是基于传感器的计划的必要组成部分，因为通常没有一个有利位置，从那里机器人可以“看到”整个环境；机器人需要将感应与运动结合起来。该过程的四个关键方面是：(1)它只使用视线距离信息，(2)它需要最小的传感器处理，(3)它不需要显式计算机器人的构型空间，(4)它是完整的。这种增量构建过程对于任何路线图方法都是通用的，因此提供了一个框架，说明如何使用局部视线信息来创建全局地图。该奖项与支持该研究的海军研究办公室的同伴奖项相协调。

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.