A Heuristic Route Planner For Autonomous Robots

Abstract

This paper describes a heuristic route planning system for use in robotic vehicles. The route planner described herein is applicable to a variety of natural terrain ground systems such as autonomous tactical vehicles and mobile robot sentries. The route planner consists of five processing stages: (1) terrain preprocessing, (2) local points-of-interest extraction, (3) postprocessing point reduction, (4) search space criterion graph construction, and (5) heuristic search path generation. Examples of these processing steps are presented and additional system improvements are discussed.