Modelos baseados em autômatos celulares para o planejamento de caminhos em robôs autônomos

Abstract

Considering path planning problem for autonomous robots, the objective is to find a list of steps to be applied to obtain a path between the initial point and the goal. This work aims the investigation and implementation of cellular automata (CA) based models to path-planning. In an initial phase, a comparative study was conducted among the cellular automata-based methods to path-planning published in the literature. Subsequently, two published works were chosen to be implemented in simulation environments to verify the actual applicability of the proposed methods. The first model starts from an image captured from the environment and it applies a CA to perform the calculation of distances between free cells and the goal. The second model uses robot sensors to identify its neighborhood and it applies CA transition rules to determine the next movements. Some limitations which prevented the robots obtain good results in simulation were identified and improvements to the original models were applied. At the end, both new models exhibited better behaviors than their precursors in several scenarios. Aiming to validate our results, two simulation environments were employed (V-REP and Webots) and some experiments with e-puck robots were performed.