The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

We present an approach to efficient navigation of autonomous wheeled robots operating in cluttered natural environments. The approach builds upon a popular method of autonomous robot navigation, where desired robot motions are computed using local and global motion planners operating in tandem. A conventional approach to designing the local planner in this setting is to evaluate a fixed number of constant-curvature arc motions and pick one that is the best balance between the quality of obstacle avoidance and minimizing traversed path length to the goal (or a similar measure of operation cost). The presented approach proposes a different set of motion alternatives considered by the local planner. Important performance improvement is achieved by relaxing the assumption that motion alternatives are constant-curvature arcs. We first present a method to measure the quality of local planners in this setting. Further, we identify general techniques of designing improved sets of motion alternatives. By virtue of a minor modification, solely replacing the motions considered by the local planner, our approach offers a measurable performance improvement of dual-planner navigation systems.

Keywords

robot navigation, motion planning, planetary exploration, surface mobility

Notes

Sponsor: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Associated Project(s): Very Rough Terrain Nonholonomic Trajectory Generation and Motion Planning for Rovers

Number of pages: 7

Text Reference

Mikhail Pivtoraiko, Alonzo Kelly, and Issa Nesnas, "Autonomous Robot Navigation using Advanced Motion Primitives," IEEE Aerospace, March, 2009, pp. 1-7.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Pivtoraiko_2009_6452,
   author = "Mikhail Pivtoraiko and Alonzo Kelly and Issa Nesnas",
   title = "Autonomous Robot Navigation using Advanced Motion Primitives",
   booktitle = "IEEE Aerospace",
   pages = "1-7",
   month = "March",
   year = "2009",
}

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