This paper briefly reviews the path planning methods that are applicable to the autonomous mobile robots for the military. Two distinct path search algorithms, A* and D* that are most popular and flexible in public applications, among those reviewed are coded and analyzed in terms of combat environment assessment factors called METT+TC for the area of operations. The results imply that it is important to consider the characteristics of defense acquisition process and the specific requirements of defense operation so that the successful technology development of the Robot products is directly linked to the defense procurement of Robot products.

This paper describes an efficient path generation method for area coverage. Its applications include robots for de-mining, cleaning, painting, and so on. Our method is basically based on a divide and conquer strategy. We developed a novel cell decomposition algorithm that divides a given area into several cells. Each cell is covered by a robot motion that requires minimum time to cover the cell. Using this method, completeness and time efficiency of coverage are easily achieved. For the completeness of coverage in dynamic environments, we also propose a path following method that makes the robot cover missed areas as a result of the presence of unknown obstacles. The effectiveness of the method is verified using computer simulations.

The most important thing for navigation of a mobile robot is to find the most suitable path and avoid the obstacles in the static and dynamic environment. This paper presents a method to search the optimal path in start space extended to time domain with considering a velocity and a direction of moving obstacles. A modified version of A* algorithm has been applied for path planning in this work and proposed a method of path search to avoid a collision with moving obstacle in space-tim domain with a velocity and an orientation of obstacles. The velocity and the direction for moving obstacle are assumed as linear form. The simulation result shows that a mobile robot navigates safely among moving obstacles of constant linear velocity. This work can be applied for not only a moving robot but also a legged humanoid robot and all fields where the path planning is required.

The purpose of this study is to develop a simulation model of rural road path for infrastructure of green-tourism and public service in rural areas. This study makes an objective function for moving cost minimization considering car travel time according to road characteristics, which can route the optimal shortest road paths between the center places and all rear villages, based on GIS coverages of road-village network for connecting between center places and rural villages as input data of the model. In order to verify the model algorithm, a homogeneous hexagonal network, assuming distribution of villages with same population density and equal distance between neighborhood villages on a level plane area, was tested to simulate the optimal paths between the selected center nodes and the other rear nodes, so that the test showed reasonable shortest paths and road intensity defined in this study. The model was also applied to the actual rural area, Ucheon-myun, which is located on Hoengsung-gun, Kangwon-do, with 72 rural villages, a center village (Uhang, 1st center place) in the area, a county conte. (Hoengsung-eup, 2nd center place), and a city (Wonju, 3rd center place), as upper settlement system. The three kinds of conte. place, Uhang, Hoengsung-eup, and Wonju, were considered as center places of three scenarios to simulate the optimal shortest paths between the centers and rural villages, respectively. The simulation results on the road-village network with road information about pavement and width of road show that several spans having high intensity of road are more important that the others, while some road spans have low intensity of road.

Path planing method for an autonomous mobile robot is considered. For the practical applications, the simplified local potential field methods are applied under the constraints of the driving condition. To improve the performance, the fuzzy-approximated linear function method is also used.