Structure of intelligence for an autonomous vechile

An Efficient Snell's Law Method for Optimal-Path Planning across Multiple Two-Dimensional, Irregular, Homogeneous-Cost Regions

“…The standard algorithm for finding optimal paths on terrain with a known cost map is a dynamicprogramming "wavefront propagation" (Chavez and Meystel 1984;Graglia and Meystel 1987;Parodi 1985;Witkowski 1983;Mitchell et al 1987). (Note that path-finding methods that search a visibility graph of region vertices (Lozano-Perez and Wesley 1979) apply to terrain with only obstacles, not regions of varying cost; and methods that designate "good" areas of free space (Brooks 1983;Crowley 1984;Rueb and Wong 1987) do not give optimal paths.)…”

A visual navigation system for autonomous land vehicles

“…Figure 1 shows an hypothetical decomposition of such a data base into regions, and two possible region sequences which join the start and goal regions. Related ideas on decomposing map data into meaningful regions have been described in [3,4,9,10,11].…”

Roads, Rivers, and Obstacles: Optimal Two-Dimensional Path Planning around Linear Features for a Mobile Agent

“…An alternative is reasoning from a terrain grid as in dynamic-programming "wavefront propagation" methods (Chavez and Meystel 1984;Mitchell and Keirsey 1984) that then search the grid as a graph. While wavefront-propagation algorithms are preferable in many applications, they have several disadvantages (discussed further in (Rowe http://faculty.nps.edu/ncrowe/newroads2.htm and Richbourg 1990)) that suggest exploring other algorithms.…”