Path planning in GPS-denied environments: A collective intelligence approach

This paper proposes a framework for reactive goal-directed navigation without global positioning facilities in unknown environments. A mobile sensor network is used for localization of regions of interest for path planning of an autonomous mobile robot in the absence of global positioning facilities. The underlying theory is an extension of a generalized gossip algorithm that has been recently developed in a language-measure-theoretic setting. The gossip algorithm has been used to propagate local decisions of target detection over a mobile sensor network and thus, it generates a belief for the target detected over the network. The proposed concept has been validated through numerical experiments with a mobile sensor network and a point mass robot.