Shortest Length Paths for a Differential Drive Robot Keeping a set of Landmarks in Sight
This paper studies the local nature of the shortest length paths for a differential drive robot, in the presence of two or more landmarks that the robot has to keep in its field of view. Such a system has to satisfy several types of constraint: the non-holonomy, the bounds on the sensor angle and a visibility constraint for the landmarks. We study the shape of the configuration space resulting from these constraints, the particular spiral-like curves (that we call S-curves) resulting from maintaining the sensor angle to its saturation values, and finally we provide a local analysis of the shortest length paths for this system, that involves these S-curves. We give a more general characterization of the shortest length paths for a set of N landmarks to be kept in sight. Finally, we describe a randomized planner that is based on these local primitives and for which we present planning simulations. The main application of this work can be found in the surveillance area, which is of special interest in present days for most Latin American metropolis.
motion planning landmark-based navigation