Autonomous Path Planning Around Sensor Blind Spots
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Solution Overview
Problem
Autonomous traveling robots and vehicles face challenges in safely navigating through environments where pedestrians or obstacles are difficult to detect by sensors, particularly in shaded or side-road areas, leading to potential collisions.
Innovation Solution
An autonomous traveling control device and system that generates a safety priority path to avoid dangerous regions where collisions with mobile objects are possible, using a traveling path determination unit to create a path that bypasses hazardous areas and a traveling control unit to execute the path, leveraging a metric map and sensor information for navigation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the autonomous traveling robot uses sensor-based obstacle detection to achieve safe traveling, then collision avoidance is possible in open areas, but detection fails in shaded regions or side roads where pedestrians may emerge
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-defining dangerous regions (such as shaded areas, side roads, and blind spots) in the navigation map before the robot encounters actual obstacles. The path planning system proactively avoids these pre-identified high-risk zones, enabling the robot to prevent potential collisions before they occur, rather than reacting to detected obstacles.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a path planning system as an intermediary between sensor detection and robot control. This intermediary layer uses pre-defined dangerous region maps to supplement sensor data, allowing the robot to make safety decisions based on both real-time detection and prior knowledge of hazardous areas, thereby overcoming sensor limitations in certain environments.
2Productivity
If the robot travels along the optimal path determined by sensor detection, then travel efficiency is maximized, but safety is compromised when pedestrians emerge from undetected regions
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by differentiating path planning into two layers: optimal paths for efficiency and safety priority paths for hazardous regions. The system dynamically switches between these layers based on the robot's location relative to pre-defined dangerous zones, maintaining high travel efficiency in safe areas while prioritizing safety when approaching known hazardous regions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary action by pre-identifying and marking dangerous regions in the environment map before navigation begins. This allows the path planning algorithm to proactively route around hazardous areas rather than reacting to obstacles, maintaining both efficiency and safety by avoiding regions where pedestrians are likely to emerge.
3Speed
If the robot relies on real-time sensor detection for path planning, then response to detected obstacles is immediate, but prevention of collisions with undetected obstacles is difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-defining dangerous regions and incorporating them into the path planning process before the robot encounters actual obstacles. This proactive approach allows the system to prevent collisions with undetected obstacles by avoiding high-risk zones, while maintaining fast response to detected obstacles through real-time sensor integration.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses feedback by continuously integrating real-time sensor detection results with the pre-defined dangerous region map. The path planning algorithm adjusts the robot's trajectory based on both historical knowledge of hazardous areas and current sensor data, creating a feedback loop that maintains both fast response and high reliability.
Data Source
AI summary
Achieved is an autonomous traveling control device which generates a safety priority path for avoiding passage through or approach to a dangerous region where a contact with another mobile object is possible, and travels along the safety priority path. The autonomous traveling control device includes a traveling path determination unit that generates a safety priority path for avoiding passage through or approach to a dangerous region where a contact with another mobile object is possible; and a traveling control unit that executes control causing the own device to travel along the safety priority path generated by the traveling path determination unit. The traveling path determination unit generates a cost priority path in a metric map on the basis of a minimum cost path in a topology map, and generates a safety priority path bypassing the dangerous region by correcting the cost priority path in the metric map.