Topological diversity and multiple path planning

Summary form only given. Conventional robot path planning aims at finding a single best path for a robot to perform a task according to certain optimization criteria. However, as a robot operates in a real environment with uncertainties, it is often desirable and even necessary for the robot to know alternative feasible paths so that it can deal with unknowns or changes in both the environment and the task effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we discuss how to define representative paths based on the concept of topological diversity in a continuous space and describe the search of such topologically diverse paths by an evolutionary planner/navigator (EP/N) based on techniques of evolutionary computation.