Navigation with foraging

We propose and study the navigation with foraging problem, where an agent with a limited sensor range must simultaneously: (1) navigate to a global goal and (2) forage en route as opportunities to forage are detected. Each foraging act causes a deviation from the shortest path to the long-term goal, with consequences for path length, mission duration, and fuel usage. We analytically calculate and/or bound the expected distance the robot actually travels, given the initial distance to the the global goal. In particular, for either of two non-trivial greedy strategies: (A) forage the point that minimizes goal-heading deviation. (B) forage the closest point ahead of the robot. Our results generalize to problems in higher dimensions.

Authors

• Michael W. Otte
• Nikolaus Correll
• Emilio Frazzoli

Keywords

• Navigation
• Robot sensing systems
• Robot kinematics
• Histograms
• Vectors
• Fuels
• Path Length
• Long-term Goals
• High-dimensional Problems
• Mission Duration
• Coordinate System
• Loss Of Generality
• Probability Density
• Dimensional Space
• Hyperplane
• Path Planning
• Rest Of This Section
• Ant Colony
• Positive Component
• Emergent Behavior
• Consequence Of The Fact
• Local Movement
• Local Coordinate System
• Markov Property
• Long-term Objectives
• Intelligence Gathering
• Casual Reader
• Pure Strategy
• non-Euclidean
• Scientific Exploration
• Global Coordinate System