Page 342 - Autonomous Mobile Robots

III

Map Building and

Path Planning

The previous two parts of the book had focused on the sensing and control
aspects of autonomous systems. These are fundamental capabilities that any
useful mobile robot ought to be equipped with. However, a truly intelligent and
autonomous system cannot dispense with the more abstract levels of deliber-
ation, involving planning and a larger amount of information processing and
reasoning. Part of these aspects of the autonomous system is dealt with in this
portion of the book.
Sensing involves the collection of information, and also involves some pre-
liminary treatment of the collected data, while control makes use of these data
for immediate determination of control signals to bring the system’s configura-
tion to the desired one. Both these processes lack the sophisticated deliberation
that makes a system intelligent. Such intelligent systems should be able to
plan their own paths through an unknown environment, make decisions about
their goals, and react to the decisions of other robots it senses.
Before the first levels of planning can actually take place, the informa-
tion obtained from sensors has to be organized into suitable and useful forms.
Very often, the success of planning algorithms rely heavily on the accuracy
of the robots’ estimation of their locations and their internal model (pos-
sibly built dynamically) of the world. Map building is the main focus of the
first chapter of this part and is given a thorough treatment. In this chapter,

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© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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