Title
Persistent Homology for Path Planning in Uncertain Environments
Abstract
We address the fundamental problem of goal-directed path planning in an uncertain environment represented as a probability (of occupancy) map. Most methods generally use a threshold to reduce the grayscale map to a binary map before applying off-the-shelf techniques to find the best path. This raises the somewhat ill-posed question, what is the right (optimal) value to threshold the map? We instead suggest a persistent homology approach to the problem—a topological approach in which we seek the homology class of trajectories that is most persistent for the given probability map. In other words, we want the class of trajectories that is free of obstacles over the largest range of threshold values. In order to make this problem tractable, we use homology in coefficients (instead of the standard coefficients), and describe how graph search-based algorithms can be used to find trajectories in different homology classes. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and practical applicability of the algorithm proposed in this paper.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/TRO.2015.2412051
Robotics, IEEE Transactions  
Keywords
Field
DocType
Trajectory,Robots,Topology,Windings,Joining processes,Planning
Motion planning,Graph,Mathematical optimization,Any-angle path planning,Control theory,Algorithm,Persistent homology,Grayscale,Mathematics,Binary number
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
1552-3098
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
22
0.94
14
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Subhrajit Bhattacharya146236.93
robert ghrist244632.46
Vijay Kumar 00013220.94