A direct approach of path planning using environmental contours

Abstract

Roadmap is important in typical robotic applications and it is not a trivial task to obtain in unknown space. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to calculate the roadmap that is robust against noisy environmental contours and the movement of the robot. In order to obtain full visibility to space, we design a direct space partitioning approach to produce the roadmap. It uses readings from rangefinders to establish sequential polygons in time, and as the robot moves, intersections among polygons are iteratively obtained. After iterations of updates, we obtain a number of polygons with stable forms. Based on the connections among the polygons, we obtain a roadmap and propose a routing algorithm to calculate paths between points in space. Simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.