Abstract
We consider the problem of walking in an unknown street, starting from a point s, to reach a target t by a robot which has a minimal sensing capability. The goal is to decrease the traversed path as short as possible. The robot cannot infer any geometric properties of the environment such as coordinates, angles or distances. The robot is equipped with a sensor that can only detect the discontinuities in the depth information (gaps) and can locate the target point as soon as it enters in its visibility region. In addition, a pebble as an identifiable point is available to the robot to mark some position of the street. We offer a data structure similar to Gap Navigation Tree to maintain the essential sensed data to explore the street. We present an online strategy that guides such a robot to navigate the scene to reach the target, based only on what is sensed at each point and is saved in the data structure. Although the robot has a limited capability, we show that the detour from the shortest path can be restricted such that generated path by our strategy is at most 11 times as long as the shortest path to target.
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Tabatabaei, A., Ghodsi, M. (2013). Walking in Streets with Minimal Sensing. In: Widmayer, P., Xu, Y., Zhu, B. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. COCOA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8287. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03780-6_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03780-6_32
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