1 research outputs found
Optimal Structure Synthesis for Environment Augmenting Robots
Building structures can allow a robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding
the set of areas it can reach. This paper presents a planning algorithm to
automatically determine what structures a construction-capable robot must build
in order to traverse its entire environment. Given an environment, a set of
building blocks, and a robot capable of building structures, we seek a optimal
set of structures (using a minimum number of building blocks) that could be
built to make the entire environment traversable with respect to the robot's
movement capabilities. We show that this problem is NP-Hard, and present a
complete, optimal algorithm that solves it using a branch-and-bound strategy.
The algorithm runs in exponential time in the worst case, but solves typical
problems with practical speed. In hardware experiments, we show that the
algorithm solves 3D maps of real indoor environments in about one minute, and
that the structures selected by the algorithm allow a robot to traverse the
entire environment. An accompanying video is available online at
https://youtu.be/B9WM557NP44