Incremental hierarchical roadmap construction for efficient path planning

This paper proposes a hierarchical roadmap (HRM) and its construction process to efficiently represent navigable areas in an indoor environment. HRM is adopted to solve the path-planning problems of mobile robots in indoor environments. HRM has a multi-layered graphical structure that enables it to abstract and cover navigable areas using a smaller number of nodes and edges than a probabilistic roadmap. During the incremental process of constructing HRM, information on navigable areas is abstracted using a sonar gridmap when the mobile robot navigates an unexplored area. The HRM-based planner efficiently searches for paths to answer queries by reducing the search space size using the multi-layered graphical structure. The benefits of the proposed HRM are experimentally verified in real indoor environments.