Planning of optimal paths for autonomous agents moving in inhomogeneous environments

Long-range route planning is an important feature of autonomous agents guidance and control during out-door missions. Offline path planning for any manoeuvres in cluttered environments depends on the pre-mission knowledge about the topographical features of the landscape between the agent´s start position and goal position. A topographical landscape consists of regions with different traversal costs, and it is not binary in nature (in terms of passable/impassable). For certain extraterrestrial or cross-country missions, where a lack of vehicular resources has to be handled, there is a strong need to calculate an optimal path according to a given optimization criterion. This paper presents an optical approach to find optimal paths in inhomogeneous environments, which follows from FERMAT´s principle. It is derived from the beam propagation method, which is commonly used in optical research areas