A Unified Approach to Planning, Sensing and Navigation for Mobile Robots

Much of the focus of the research effort in path planning for mobile robots has centred on the problem of finding a path from a start location to a goal location, while minimising one or more parameters such as length of path, energy consumption or journey time. Most of the experimental results reported in the literature have centred on simulation results. Only a small subset of the reported results have been implemented on real autonomous mobile robots. It is the goal of our research program to develop path planning algorithms whose correctness and robustness can be tested and verified by implementation on our experimental, self-contained and autonomous mobile robot the Yamabico [Yuta et.al. 91].