Spatial Data Structures for Robotic Vehicle Route Planning

This is the final report for the Phase II SBIR contract, Spatial Data Structures for Robotic Vehicle Route Planning. The report describes the work completed during Phase II and discusses the directions for future research. The goal of the Phase II SBIR contract was to investigate techniques and tradeoffs for representing digital terrain information in a computer environment. The long-term goal of this research is to build a Spatial Data Structure Development System (SDSDS) to serve as the infrastructure base for terrain analysis applications. The Phase II contract addressed the following issues: 1) implementation of common terrain representations, 2) implementation of common spatial operations, 3) design of a methodology for evaluating the performance of spatial operations, 4) evaluation of the implemented representations and operations, and 5)initial design of testbed on which the SDSDS would be built.