Resumen de Navigating over 3D environments while minimizing cumulative exposure to hazardous fields

Michael A. Demetriou, Efstathios Bakolas

• This note revisits the navigation problem for a mobile agent in 3D environments and incorporates the accumulated effects of a hazardous spatial field on the mobile agent motion. Such effects are encountered by human evacuation of indoor environments with carbon monoxide as the hazardous field. The accumulated amount of carbon monoxide inhaled during the flight to escape plays a detrimental role in the ability of an evacuee to escape; if this accumulated amount inhaled exceeds a threshold value the evacuee is incapacitated. Using the accumulated amount, represented by the line integral of the spatial field along the chosen escape trajectory, as an augmented state, the navigation problem is cast as an optimal control problem. The solution to the 3D navigation over hazardous fields, which is applicable to both human evacuees in indoor environments and mobile robots traversing over hazardous environments, is presented and a related problem of minimizing the accumulated amount is also formulated and solved. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the proposed results.