Planning robotic exploratory missions in the absence of global positioning

This paper presents a new approach to the design of exploratory (survey) robotic missions, for platforms which have no means of global positioning. Contrary to traditional approaches to this problem, which are mainly concerned with minimizing path length, the authors' work explicitly addresses the expected evolution of positioning errors and their impact on mission execution. Imposing a nonobservable departure from nominal conditions, errors in self-positioning of the robotic platform can compromise the achievement of the mission goal and even lead to platform loss. They address the problem of a priori characterization of the evolution of the positioning errors, for platforms with only local observability of their own position. They present general results, assuming a particular structure of the dynamical/sensors model that describes the platform. These results are then applied to the analysis of survey missions of the autonomous underwater vehicle MAUVE.