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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

This paper presents a planner that determines a path such that the robot does not have to heavily rely on odometry to reach its goal. The planner determines a sequence of obstacle boundaries that the robot must follow to reach the goal. Since this planner is used in the context of a coverage algorithm already presented by the authors, we assume that the free space is already, completely or partially, represented by a cellular decomposition whose cell boundaries are defined by critical points of Morse functions (isolated points at obstacle boundaries). The topological relationship among the cells is represented by a graph where nodes are the critical points and edges connect the nodes that define a common cell (i.e., the edges correspond to the cells themselves). A search of this graph yields a sequence of cells that directs the robot from a start to a goal. Once a sequence of cells and critical points are determined, a robot traverses each cell by mainly following the boundary of the cell along the obstacle boundaries and minimizes the accumulated dead-reckoning error at the intermediate critical points. This allows the robot to reach the goal robustly even in the presence of dead-reckoning error.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Biorobotics

Number of pages: 7

Text Reference

Ercan Acar and Howie Choset, "Exploiting Critical Points to Reduce Positioning Error for Sensor-based Navigation," Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA '02), May, 2002.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Acar_2002_4450,
   author = "Ercan Acar and Howie Choset",
   title = "Exploiting Critical Points to Reduce Positioning Error for Sensor-based Navigation",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA '02)",
   month = "May",
   year = "2002",
}

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