Strategies for Sensor-based Terrain Acquisition by a Mobile Robot

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The problem of terrain acquisition presents a special case of robot motion planning. In it, a mobile robot is requested to perform a complete, in some sense, exploration of an unfamiliar scene populated with obstacles (objects) of unknown shapes and dimensions, using some sort of sensory feedback (e.g., vision) and generating as short a path during the operation as possible. The result of such exploration can be, for example, a map of the scene. Algorithms considered so far in literature make strong assumptions about the obstacles - e.g., that they are polygonal- and measure the algorithm performance in terms of the number of constraints describing obstacles, such as the Number of obstacle vertices. In this paper, two formulations of the terrain acquisition problem are considered, differing in what the "complete exploration" means; both assume continuous (on-line) motion planning and obstacles of arbitrary shape. Accordingly, two algorithms are described for acquiring planar terrains, and estimates of the algorithm performance are derived as upper bounds on the lengths of generated paths.