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Imagine you are visiting Vienna for the first time. There are a lot of great places to see -- probably even places that you have not heard about before. Since you want to explore on your own, you do not buy a map and start walking. After some time, you notice that your tour is not quite optimal, you could have visited more places if you knew the layout of the town. Of course no minute exploring Vienna is wasted, but still, how much time would a map have saved you? In more formal terms, this can be modeled as one of the standard problems in robotics. A robot starting at a base has to visit the whole graph and return to its home. If you know the whole graph, then this is much easier than if you start with zero information about the graph. A similar problem of interest is to evacuate, i.e., you have to find a specific spot where the exit is hidden. Collaboration can also be of interest, where multiple agents/robots explore the unknown environment. Possible research directions are mostly in the realm of algorithms and theory, but also some implementation could be possible. If you are interested, contact us and we can discuss possible directions for your thesis/project. To get a feeling for some past research on these topics (non-exhaustive), please feel free to look at the following: |
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