NASA Logo

NTRS

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

Back to Results
Situationally Driven Local Navigation for Mobile RobotsFor 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 (NaT's) 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 NaT's 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 NaT's 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.
Document ID
19910002968
Acquisition Source
Headquarters
Document Type
Thesis/Dissertation
Authors
Slack, Marc Glenn
(Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ. Blacksburg, VA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 14, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 1990
Subject Category
Cybernetics
Accession Number
91N12281
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other

Available Downloads

There are no available downloads for this record.
No Preview Available