Terrain Model Acquisition by Mobile Robot Teams and n-Connectivity

Abstract. The connectivity of the con guration space has been a valuable concept in the motion planning for single robots in both known and unknown terrains. We show here that n-connectivity plays a similar role for mobile robot teams in providing algorithms for terrain model acquisition in unknown terrains. A bound on the connectivity degree of the free-space, re ected in that of a navigation course, provides us an estimate of the size of a robot team that is e ective for the terrain. We consider an unknown planar polygonal terrain. The robots are point-sized and equipped with visual sensors which acquire all visible parts of the terrain by scan operations executed from their locations. The performance is measured by the number of sensor (scan) operations which are assumed to be the most time-consuming of all the robot operations. We show that the Voronoi diagrams and trapezoidal decomposition methods yield solutions for e cient terrain model acquisition by a 2- and 3-robot team using...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DARS
• Authors: Nageswara S. V. Rao
• Keywords: DARS 2000, Robot, Robotics, Terrain Model Acquisition, Unknown Terrains