  The costs incurred in a mobile robot (MR) change due to change in physical
and environmental factors. Usually, there are two approaches to consider these
costs, either explicitly modelling these different factors to calculate the
cost or consider heuristics costs. First approach is lengthy and cumbersome and
requires a new model for every new factor. Heuristics cost cannot account for
the change in cost due to change in state. This work proposes a new method to
compute these costs, without the need of explicitly modelling the factors. The
identified cost is modelled in a bi-linear state-space form where the change of
costs is formed due to the change of these states. This eliminates the need to
model all factors to derive the cost for every robot. In context of
transportation, the travel time is identified as the key parameter to
understand costs of traversing paths to carry material. The necessity to
identify and estimate these travel times is proved by using them in route
planning. The paths are computed constantly and average of total path costs of
these paths are compared with that of paths obtained by heuristics costs. The
results show that average total path costs of paths obtained through on-line
estimated travel times are 15\% less that of paths obtained by heuristics
costs.
