CS 520 : Project 1 - Voyage Into the Unknown
This project is intended as an exploration of a variant of the A* search algorithm covered in class, in the traditional
application of Robotic Path Planning. In particular, we are going to look at a situation where the environment is
not fully known in advance, and must be learned by the agent as it moves through it.
A gridworld is a discretization of terrain into square cells that are either unblocked (traversable) or blocked. Consider the following problem: an agent in a gridworld has to move from its current cell (S) to a goal cell, the location of
a stationary target. The layout of the gridworld (what cells are blocked or unblocked) is unknown. These kinds of
challenges arise frequently in robotics, where a mobile platform equipped with sensors builds a map of the world as it traverses an unknown environment