Covert Robotics: hiding in known environments

This paper is an extension to a previous work on our research in path planning: Covert Robotics (Amrzouqi and Jarvis, 2003). In this paper, a new application is introduced where the aim is to allow a mobile robot in a known environment to escape the observation of moving sentries. Whether the initial sentries´ locations are known or can be predicted, our hiding strategy insures the overall robot covertness for the longest possible time by planning a covert path to an appropriate hiding position in the environment. The Time-to-Exposure algorithm, that is introduced here, is our approach to achieve the hiding strategy. The algorithm gives a value for each free cell specifying the maximum guaranteed time before possible observation by one or more sentries. The same strategy has been tested on a different situation where the robot has continuous information about the moving sentries´ locations. The hiding technique was tested using a simulator which shows promising results. A number of test cases are presented.