High Level Path Planning with Uncertainty

For high level path planning, environments are usually modeled as distance graphs, and path planning problems are reduced to com­ puting the shortest path in distance graphs. One major drawback of this modeling is the inability to model uncertainties, which are of­ ten encountered in practice. In this paper, a new tool, called U-graph, is proposed for environment modeling. A U-graph is an ex­ tension of distance graphs with the ability to handle a kind of uncertainty. By model­ ing an uncertain environment as a U-graph, and a navigation problem as a Markovian decision process, we can precisely define a new optimality criterion for navigation plans, and more importantly, we can come up with a general algorithm for computing optimal plans for navigation tasks.