Distributed Route Planning Using Partial Map-Building

Our goal is to manipulate and guide an object across an unknown environment toward a goal in a known location in space. Our tools include a system of manipulation robots, which are “blind” and one mobile scout robot who relies on a series of sonar sensors for information about the environment. Previous solutions to this problem have taken a simultaneous guiding and manipulating approach, moving the whole system under the scout’s guidance. My approach, however, presents a separate scouting algorithm that can return a series of coordinates through which the manipulation system can safely pass to reach the goal in a static environment. This new approach produces more optimal paths to the goal, as well as evading the concern of what actions to take should the entire system reach a dead end. In this paper I will present both the algorithm and the experimental results I obtained when I built the scouting system.