Development of an efficient perception system and a path planning algorithm for autonomous mobile robots

The current work deals with the development of enabling technologies for autonomous mobile robots. A perception system, based on a laser range finder sensor, has been developed to enable robots to construct 3-D maps of their surroundings from which projected free configuration space maps are generated. These maps are then used by a computationally efficient path planning algorithm to yield the shortest possible route between the current and the user-defined final position of the robot.