Title :
Where´s waldo at time t ? using spatio-temporal models for mobile robot search
Author :
Krajnik, Tomas ; Kulich, Miroslav ; Mudrova, Lenka ; Ambrus, Rares ; Duckett, Tom
Author_Institution :
Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Syst., Univ. of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
Abstract :
We present a novel approach to mobile robot search for non-stationary objects in partially known environments. We formulate the search as a path planning problem in an environment where the probability of object occurrences at particular locations is a function of time. We propose to explicitly model the dynamics of the object occurrences by their frequency spectra. Using this spectral model, our path planning algorithm can construct plans that reflect the likelihoods of object locations at the time the search is performed. Three datasets collected over several months containing person and object occurrences in residential and office environments were chosen to evaluate the approach. Several types of spatio-temporal models were created for each of these datasets and the efficiency of the search method was assessed by measuring the time it took to locate a particular object. The results indicate that modeling the dynamics of object occurrences reduces the search time by 25% to 65% compared to maps that neglect these dynamics.
Keywords :
mobile robots; path planning; search problems; frequency spectra; mobile robot search; object occurrences dynamics; path planning problem; spatio-temporal models; Mobile robots; Robot sensing systems; Search problems; Testing; Training; long-term autonomy; mobile robotics;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Seattle, WA
DOI :
10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139481