An Efficient Mobile Robot Path Planning Using Hierarchical Roadmap Representation in Indoor Environment

This paper describes a practical approach to solve a path planning problem in a home environment. The proposed approach incrementally constructs the hierarchical roadmap which has a multi-layered structure using a sonar grid map when a mobile robot navigates in unexplored area. The hierarchical roadmap can almost completely cover the traversable areas in the environment. The mobile robot path planner using the hierarchical roadmap can efficiently search for appropriate paths under the limited computing power and time by reducing the search space size. The benefits of the hierarchical roadmap representation were verified by experiments in a home environment.