Visibility techniques applied to robotics

Abstract

In this paper we describe two concrete applications of visibility to robotics. Both applications are related to the situation in which a robot is in a known environment, of which a map is given. The basic concept on the basis of our contributions is that of mathematical visibility. The visibility polygon of a point or of an edge can be used in different robot tasks, i.e. obstacle avoidance, path planning and localization. The strength of visibility is that different information can be extracted directly from the map through an offline operation. Furthermore the computation of the visibility polygon of a point can be applied instead of the classical methods used for the sensor reading simulation based on ray casting techniques.