Learning Innovative Routes for Mobile Robots in Dynamic Partially Unknown Environments

This paper examines path planning strategies in partially unknown dynamic environemnts and introduces an approach to learning innovative routes. The approach is verified against shortest path planning with a distance transform algorithm, local and global replanning and suboptimal route following in unknown, partially unknown, static and dynamic environments. We show that the learned routes are more reliable and when traversed repeatedly the robot’s behaviour becomes more predictable. The test results also suggest that the robot’s behaviour depends on knowledge about the environemnt but not about the path planning strategy used.