A heuristic planner and an executive for mobile robot control

A path planner and an execution system are proposed for automatic indoor guidance. The planner creates a route plan in two levels of hierarchy. The first level selects doors to pass through, minimizing the total number of doors, and the other generates a near shortest trajectory inside a room. In order to reduce search space and computation time for the planning, heuristic pruning strategies are employed in a path search procedure. The execution system performs hierarchical plan repair with regard to the plan levels against unexpected events by detecting obstacles. Simulation tests are conducted to evaluate its execution behavior with various representations of terrain, unknown obstacles, and an omnidirectional vehicle robot equipped with a sonic range finder for obstacle detection. The results exhibit the effectiveness of simple heuristics in combination with a sonic range finder that provides an adequate amount of data from multiple viewpoints.