On path planning for mobile robots: Introducing the mereological potential field method in the framework of mereological spatial reasoning

Abstract

Path planning is one of the most vital problems in mobile robotics; it falls into general province of planning, however, due to specificity of the subject of mobile robotics, it has emerged as a discipline per se with its own solutions. Among many methods of probabilistic, geometrical and topological nature, the methodology of potential fields introduced by Krogh (1984) and Khatib (1985), based on physical analogies with gravitational or electromagnetic fields, has emerged. We adhere to this methodology, however, contrary to the practice of building the potential on the basis of Coulomb, or gravitational force fields, we apply the novel idea of building the potential function by means of mereological distance over a juxtaposition of grids of fixed diameter, i.e., over a discrete structure. We describe our implementation of the relevant mereological functors in the Player/Stage system as SQL predicates accessible in Player/Stage cooperating with PostgreSQL database. We present also the results of simulations with mobile robots