Mobile robots are often tasked with repeatedly navigating through an environment whose traversability changes over time. These may exhibit some hidden structure, which can be learned. Many studies consider reactive algorithms for online planning, however, these do not take advantage of the past executions navigation task future tasks. In this article, we formalize problem minimizing total expec...

Much prior work in mobile robot path planning har been based on assumptions that are not really applicable for exploration of planetary terrains. Based on the first author’s experience with the recent Mars Pathfinder mission, this paper reviews the issues that are critical for successful autonomous navigation of planetary rovers. No currently proposed methodology accurately addresses ali of the...

Planning and control for a wheeled mobile robot are challenging problems when poorly traversable terrains, including dynamic obstacles, are considered. To accomplish a mission, the control system should firstly guarantee the vehicle integrity, for example with respect to possible roll-over/tip-over phenomena. A fundamental contribution to achieve this goal, however, comes from the planner as we...

We present robust and efficient means for mobile robot navigation using a 3D representation of the environment. We build 3D surfel grid maps and propose Monte Carlo localization with probabilistic observation models for 2D and 3D sensors in such maps. In contrast to localization methods that utilize a 2D laser scanner in a static horizontal mounting, our method takes advantage of the 3D structu...

This paper introduces a new concept of " tethered detachable hook (TDH) " and its launching winch. TDH system is the device which will be mounted on a mobile robot and enhances its traversability over extremely hostile terrain by launching detachable hook to nearby objects, producing large traction force by the tether and detaching/recovering the hook to the launcher again. In this paper the au...

The challenge in the DARPA Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) project is to autonomously navigate a small robot using stereo vision as the main sensor. During this project, we demonstrated a complete autonomous system for off-road navigation in unstructured environments, using stereo vision as the main sensor. The system is very robust – we can typically give it a goal position several hu...

The shortest/optimal path generation is essential for the efficient operation of a mobile robot. Recent advances in robotics and machine intelligence have led to the application of modern optimization method such as the genetic algorithm (GA), to solve the path-planning problem. However, the genetic algorithm path planning approach in the previous works requires a preprocessing step that captur...

Previous work has considered the problem of swiftly traversing a marked traversal-medium where the marks represent probabilities that associated local regions are traversable, further supposing that the traverser is equipped with a dynamic capability to disambiguate these regions en route. In practice, however, the marks are given by a noisy sensor, and are only estimates of the respective prob...

In this paper new exact solutions in eight dimensional Lovelock theory will be presented. These solutions are vacuum static wormhole, black hole and generalized Bertotti-Robinson space-times with nontrivial torsion. All the solutions have a cross product structure of the type M5 × Σ3 where M5 is a five dimensional manifold and Σ3 a compact constant curvature manifold. The wormhole is the first ...

This paper presents an integrated approach to mobile robot path planning by combining grid-map based and case-based methods. The map-based path planner is used to suggest new innovative solutions for a particular path planning problem. A probabilistic path transform method is introduced for grid-map based path planning which proposes several alternative solutions for a single path planning prob...