Spatial Reasoning: Planning Among Movable Obstacles

Author:
Mike Stilman
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:
Autonomous robots operating in real world, unstructured environments cannot rely on the existence of collision free paths or feasible trajectories. Search and rescue, construction and planetary exploration domains contain debris that obstructs the robots path. Theoretically, one can represent all possible interactions between the robot and these objects as a single search problem. However, the resulting nonlinear state space would be exponentially large. In this thesis we explore methods for reasoning about the robots state space to reduce problem dimensionality and accomplish autonomous motion in the presence of movable objects.

Further Details:
A copy of the thesis proposal document can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mstilman/proposal/stilman-proposal.pdf.