CMU thesis proposal: Real-time Planning for Single Agents and Multi-agent Teams in Unknown and Dynamic Environments

David Ferguson, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
3 Mar 2006

Abstract
As autonomous agents make the transition from solving simple, well-behaved problems to being useful entities in the real world, they must deal with the added complexity and uncertainty inherent in real environments. In particular, agents navigating through the real world can be confronted with incomplete or imperfect information (e.g. when prior maps are absent or incomplete), large state spaces (e.g. for robots with several degrees of freedom or teams of robots), and dynamic elements (e.g. when there are humans or other agents in the environment). In this work, we propose to address the problem of path planning and replanning in both static and dynamic environments for which prior information may be incomplete or imperfect. We intend to develop a set of planning algorithms that will enable single agents and multi-agent teams to operate more effectively in a wider range of realistic scenarios.

A copy of the thesis proposal document can be found at http://gs2045.sp.cs.cmu.edu/downloads/proposal.pdf.