A gis-based simulation model for military path planning of unmanned ground robots

Abstract

A GIS-based simulation model has been developed for military path planning of unmanned ground robots in a hazardous combat environment. Critical factors (such as slope of terrain, surface travel distance, degree of bumpiness in various land-uses, and exposure to enemies) that affect the path planning in a combat environment are carefully reviewed and modeled. Line-of-sight analysis and probabilistic decision making process are also modeled for the effective military path planning. In the model, the path planning is dealt with two sub-problems: (i) global path fi nding and (ii) local navigation. These two sub-problems are recursively processed during the simulation; a temporary least-cost path is calculated in the fi rst stage, and navigation of the unmanned ground robot along the path is then processed in the second stage. The simulation ends when the robot reaches a target location. The proposed model has been applied in different environments with various GIS data. The result shows that the model performs well for the military path planning, and can be useful for testing and evaluating tactical missions to be performed by the robot before its deployment in a real-world situation.

The Reachability Problem in Constructive Geometric Constraint Solving Based Dynamic Geometry

“…In robotics the reachability of a robot manipulator to a target is defined as its ability to move its joints and links in free space in order for its hand to reach the given target, Yang et al (2011);Ying and Iyengar (2011). In motion planning an unmanned ground robot vehicle used in an outdoor environment over a wide variety of terrain, reachability is understood as to develop an effective path which positions and routes the friendly robotic agent in a hostile environment, Kang et al (2010). In Internet, the routing host or gateway must supply a path of reachable routers and gateways to attempt to send datagrams to a gateway that is nearer the destination, Halabi (2000).…”

Geometric constraint solving in a dynamic geometry framework.

“…A huge amount of literature on reachability have been published mainly in the field of abstract computational models see for example [10]. Examples of classical fields where the reachability problem is considered are graphs theory, [14,93,95,111], Petri nets, [80,81,85,110], motion planning, [54,76,77], geographical navigation, [2,3,32,92] and robotics, [69,77,109,112]. A feature common to most of the referred works deal with systems the behavior of which can be basically captured by identifying a set of well-defined discrete states.…”