Warning: This page is provided for historical and archival purposes only. While the seminar dates are correct, we offer no guarantee of informational accuracy or link validity. Contact information for the speakers, hosts and seminar committee are certainly out of date. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Author ------ Howie Choset Title ----- Sensor Based Planning: The Hierarchical Generalized Voronoi Graph. Abstract -------- Sensor based planning incorporates sensor information reflecting the state of a robot's environment into its planning process, whereas traditional approaches assume complete prior knowledge of the robot's environment. Sensor based planning is necessary for the realistic deployment of robots in collapsed buildings, underground waste storage receptacles, underwater caverns, and similar unmodeled environments. Recent research has focused on the development and incremental construction of the Hierarchical Generalized Voronoi Graph, a network of curves which provides a basis for sensor based motion planning in an unknown static environment. The HGVG affords a concise one-dimensional representation of a robot's multidimensional configuration space, without requiring detailed knowledge of the robot's surroundings. The HGVG is advantageous in that it lends itself to sensor based construction in a provable way. Simulations in three dimensions and experiments with a mobile robot have validated this approach where range sensor data is used.