Multiresolution Path-planning with Waiting Strategies in Spatiotemporally-varying Threat Fields

We address the problem of finding an optimal path for a vehicle in a planar environment where traversal costs are based on a time-varying spatial field defined over the environment. The resulting optimal path may contain instances of ’waiting’, where the vehicle hovers, parks, or loiters. We develop a test condition for evaluting beneficial waiting based on the local characteristics of the threat field at the current vehicle location. Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the benefit of waiting given certain field characteristics. The cost reduction and computation benefits of the local field test condition are also evaluated. In the multiresolution analysi we assume that the accuracy with which the values of the spatial field are known gradually decreases with increasing distance from the vehicle’s current location. To extend previous results in the literature, we present a wavelet transform-based multiresolution motion-planning approach that incorporates traversal and waiting costs based on a time-varying spatial field and present preliminary results regarding cost-reduced paths due to waiting and computational performance.