Optimal route planning for wheeled mobile robots. An optical approach

Long-range route planning is important to prepare missions for autonomous wheeled mobile robots in space applications. Usually a lack of energy resources has to be considered, when an exploration path for a space rover is predefined off-line. This leads to an optimization problem taking into account a number of target positions embedded in a cluttered environment. The fundamental landscape features of the rover's environment are known in advance by satellite exploration. The resulting topographical map consists of regions with different traversal costs. The optical approach to the route planning problem considered here is based on landscape substitution by an optical analogous refractive index distribution, and consequent application of a numerical beam propagation method.