Vision-guided exploration: a step toward general motion planning in three dimensions

An approach to solving the path planning problem for a mobile robot operating in an unknown, three dimensional environment containing obstacles of arbitrary shape is presented. The main contributions are an analysis of the type of sensing information that is necessary and sufficient for solving the path planning problem in such environments, and the development of a framework for designing a provably correct algorithm to solve this problem. Working from first principles, without any assumptions about the environment of the robot or its sensing capabilities, the analysis shows that the ability to explore the obstacle surfaces (i.e., to make all their points visible) is intrinsically linked to the ability to plan the motion of the robot. It is argued that current approaches to the path planning problem with incomplete information simply do not extend to the general three-dimensional case, and that qualitatively different algorithms are needed