Using linear landmarks for path planning with uncertainty in outdoor environments

This paper presents two new approaches that enable the use of linear landmarks for planning paths with uncertainty in position in outdoor environments. The first approach uses a combination of forward simulation and entropy to reduce the dimensionality of the search space, while still preserving most of the information required to propagate a full covariance matrix. The second approach adds incremental binning to improve the quality of the solution while still keeping the dimensionality of the search space relatively low. These approaches provide a better compromise of speed and quality of the solution than most existing approaches, and are able to successfully utilize linear landmarks in large outdoor environments.