Problems motivated by robot navigation have been studied theoretically and practically for many years. Nowadays the state of art in both fields has attained a level that seems to allow for a completely autonomous control of robots. Our interdisciplinary project aims at advancing both algorithmic and practical methods, such that a real-world robot (Kurt3D) that is capable of three-dimensional mapping can be used for autonomous exploration.
This makes high demands on the development of optimization algorithms with complete or incomplete information; moreover, we require the development of a totally new optimization methodology that minimizes an objective function consisting of both the running time of the algorithm and the achieved running time of the robot. These problems are met by the theoretical part of our research group.
Furthermore, the practical application on a real-world platform poses a challenge and calls for strong technical know-how which is provided by the practical part of our research group.
Particularly noteworthy is that the project is based on an already well-established interdisciplinary cooperation.