Simultaneous path planning and free space exploration with skin sensor

This paper addresses a general class of problems for sensor-based path planning and exploration for robots moving in unknown environments. The robot is assumed to be equipped with a large number of proximity sensors mounted on its body (a "skin" sensor). Robot\´s own motion is used to sense the free space, analogous to a blind person "groping and exploring" using his sense of touch. This sensed free space can be memorized and used to further plan the robot\´s motion. Using this key idea, we propose a general framework for such skin sensor based motion planning that is valid for robots with large degrees of freedom. The specific motion-planning algorithm developed uses a variant of the probabilistic roadmap method. A novel "metric" based on the notion of C-zone map for robot\´s movement that results in efficient exploration of configuration space is proposed and implemented. Planar simulations demonstrate our results.