Shortest safe path planning for vehicles

The objective of this paper is to bring an effective response to the safe path planning problem which should be solved in an uncertain-configuration space. Firstly, a path planning method dealing with localization uncertainties is proposed, where the uncertainties in both position and orientation of a non-holonomic mobile robot are considered. The safety of this method is due to the mixing of the planning phase and the navigation phase sing the same process of localization (the Kalman filter). Secondly, while previous works planned safe paths in the configuration space, we show that it is necessary to plan safe paths in an uncertain-configuration space. Then, we introduce the novel concept of "towers of uncertainties" and show the effectiveness of this concept with an example.