Coastal Navigation { Robot Motion with Uncertainty
Ships often use the coasts of continents for navigation in the absence of better tools such as GPS, since being close to the land allows sailors to determine with high accuracy where they are. Similarly for mobile robots, in many environments global and accurate localization is not always feasible. Environments can lack features, and dynamic obstacles such as people can confuse and block sensors. In this paper, we demonstrate a technique for achieving better localization by generating trajectories that model explicitly both the information content of the environment, and the density of the people in the environment. These trajectories reduce the average positional certainty along their length, reducing the likelihood the robot will become lost at any point.