Situationally driven local navigation for mobile robots

For mobile robots to autonomously accommodate dynamically changing navigation tasks in a goal-directed fashion, they must employ navigation plans. Any such plan must provide for the robot’s immediate and continuous need for guidance while remaining highly flexible in order to avoid costly computation each time the robot’s perception of the world changes. Due to the world’s uncertainties, creation and maintenance of navigation plans cannot involve arbitrarily complex processes, as the robot’s perception of the world will be in constant flux, requiring modifications to be made quickly if they are to be of any use. This work introduces Navigation Templates (or NaTs) which are building blocks for the construction and maintenance of rough navigation plans which capture the relationship that objects in the world have to the current navigation task. By encoding only the critical relationship between the objects in the world and the navigation task, a NaT-based navigation plan is highly flexible; allowing new constraints to be quickly incorporated into the plan and existing constraints to be updated or deleted from the plan. To satisfy the robot’s need for immediate local guidance, the NaTs forming the current navigation plan are passed to a transformation function. The transformation function analyzes the plan with respect to the robot’s current location to quickly determine (a few times a second) the locally preferred direction of travel. This dissertation presents NaTs and the transformation function as well as the needed support systems to demonstrate the usefulness of the technique for controlling the actions of a mobile robot operating in an uncertain world. ¹ This work was supported in part by a grant from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and by a grant from the Naval Surface Weapons Center.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

1990

Author dc:creator

• Slack, Marc G.

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Miller, David P.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Nadler, Morton
• Roach, John W.
• Henry, Sallie M.
• Shaffer, Clifford A.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

etd-07282008-135258

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/38949