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Navigating modular robots in the face of heuristic depressions

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Book cover Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 5

Abstract

A modular robotic system is composed of a number of modules, each of which can change its position relative to its neighboring modules under certain physical constraints. The modular robotic system can move itself flexibly by repeated motions of its component modules. However, a huge size of possible combinations of subsequent module motions and tight physical constraints among them cause difficulty in making an appropriate plan for the modular robotic system to reach a designated goal position, especially when it is located in unfamiliar environments with obstacles. Heuristic search methods fail to find a plan efficiently due to poor cost estimation used in the search (i.e., heuristic depression problem). In this paper, we propose a method for navigating the modular robotic system by extending a real-time heuristic search algorithm to overcome the heuristic depression problem. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for navigating the modular robots in several problem settings.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Tokyo

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Miyashita, K., Kokaji, S. (2002). Navigating modular robots in the face of heuristic depressions. In: Asama, H., Arai, T., Fukuda, T., Hasegawa, T. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 5. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-65943-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-65941-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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