Covert Robotics: hiding in known environments

This paper is an extension to a previous work on our research in path planning: Covert Robotics (Amrzouqi and Jarvis, 2003). In this paper, a new application is introduced where the aim is to allow a mobile robot in a known environment to escape the observation of moving sentries. Whether the initial sentries' locations are known or can be predicted, our hiding strategy insures the overall robot covertness for the longest possible time by planning a covert path to an appropriate hiding position in the environment. The Time-to-Exposure algorithm, that is introduced here, is our approach to achieve the hiding strategy. The algorithm gives a value for each free cell specifying the maximum guaranteed time before possible observation by one or more sentries. The same strategy has been tested on a different situation where the robot has continuous information about the moving sentries' locations. The hiding technique was tested using a simulator which shows promising results. A number of test cases are presented.