Robot Path Planning in Uncertain Environments: A Language-Measure-Theoretic Approach

This paper addresses the problem of goal-directed robot path planning in the presence of uncertainties that are induced by bounded environmental disturbances and actuation errors. The offline infinite-horizon optimal plan is locally updated by online finite-horizon adaptive replanning upon observation of unexpected events (e.g., detection of unanticipated obstacles). The underlying theory is developed as an extension of a grid-based path planning algorithm, called ν ∗, which was formulated in the framework of probabilistic finite state automata (PFSA) and language measure from a control-theoretic perspective. The proposed concept has been validated on a simulation test bed that is constructed upon a model of typical autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of uncertainties.