# Look before you sweep: Visibility-aware motion planning

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a visibility-aware motion planning approach for robots with directional sensors, ensuring safety by accounting for sensor field of view and occlusions in cluttered environments.

## Contribution

It formalizes the problem of visibility-aware planning for directional sensors and proposes multiple solution methods with computational trade-offs.

## Key findings

- Proposed formal definition of the visibility-aware planning problem.
- Developed several solution algorithms with different computational efficiencies.
- Experimental validation in illustrative environments demonstrating effectiveness.

## Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of planning for a robot with a directional obstacle-detection sensor that must move through a cluttered environment. The planning objective is to remain safe by finding a path for the complete robot, including sensor, that guarantees that the robot will not move into any part of the workspace before it has been seen by the sensor. Although a great deal of work has addressed a version of this problem in which the "field of view" of the sensor is a sphere around the robot, there is very little work addressing robots with a narrow or occluded field of view. We give a formal definition of the problem, several solution methods with different computational trade-offs, and experimental results in illustrative domains.