A Two-Stage Method for Target Searching in the Path Planning for Mobile Robots
1
School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100193, China
2
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Beihang University, Beijing 100193, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2020, 20(23), 6919; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236919
Received: 23 October 2020
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Revised: 25 November 2020
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Accepted: 2 December 2020
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Published: 3 December 2020
(This article belongs to the Section Sensors and Robotics)
The path planning for target searching in mobile robots is critical for many applications, such as warehouse inspection and caring and surveillance for elderly people in the family scene. To ensure visual complete coverage from the camera equipped in robots is one of the most challenging tasks. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-stage optimization model to efficiently obtain an approximate optimal solution. In this model, we first develop a method to determine the key locations for visual complete coverage of a two-dimensional grid map, which is constructed by drawing lessons from the method of corner detection in the image processing. Then, we design a planning problem for searching the shortest path that passes all key locations considering the frequency of target occurrence. The testing results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the significantly shorter search path length and the shorter target search time than the current Rule-based Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in various simulation cases. Furthermore, the results show that the improved optimization algorithm with the priori known frequency of occurrence of the target can further improve the searching with shorter searching time. We also set up a test in a real environment to verify the feasibility of our algorithm.
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Keywords:
targets search; mobile robot; path planning; visual complete coverage; two-stage
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MDPI and ACS Style
Song, T.; Huo, X.; Wu, X. A Two-Stage Method for Target Searching in the Path Planning for Mobile Robots. Sensors 2020, 20, 6919. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236919
AMA Style
Song T, Huo X, Wu X. A Two-Stage Method for Target Searching in the Path Planning for Mobile Robots. Sensors. 2020; 20(23):6919. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236919
Chicago/Turabian StyleSong, Tao, Xiang Huo, and Xinkai Wu. 2020. "A Two-Stage Method for Target Searching in the Path Planning for Mobile Robots" Sensors 20, no. 23: 6919. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236919
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