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Tactic-guided Cooperative Path Planner

Thomas Léauté
16.412J Cognitive Robotics Course Project Report, Spring 2004

keywords: Path Planning, Robotics, Linear Programming, Temporal Reasoning, UAV, Receding Horizon 

Introduction

This is the final report for the Spring 2004 16.412J course project. I chose to focus my project on the design and implementation of a Tactic-Guided Cooperative Path Planner, using Linear Programming. This personal project was part of a larger group project involving the design of a fairly complex activity and path planning architecture for cooperative autonomous agents.

In this report, I will first quickly present the overall planning architecture of this group project, how my path planner folds into this design and how it interacts with the other components of the system. I will then give an overview of the functionalities of the path planner, explain to what extent its design builds upon previous work in the planning research field, and describe in more details the innovations of the approach I took to tackle the problem.  

One part of this report will also be dedicated to explaining the software interface I have been working on in order to demonstrate the path planner and the whole architecture on a flight simulation testbed. I will also present some results and runs we made on this simulator to demonstrate the capabilities of our activity and path planning architecture.  

Finally, the last section will gather the imperfections and weaknesses of the current design that will have been introduced in the previous sections and suggest improvements to the path planner.  

full text in PDF         PDF of group project presentation (1.6MB)