Towards A Real-Time Architecture for Obstacle Avoidance and Path Planning in Mobile Robots

We describe the design and partial implementation of a real time architecture for a mobile robot, aimed particularly towards a vehicle developed for factory automation.. We develop a layered design to equip the robot with a number of behavioural competences. We examine sensing and a potential field algorithm especially to achieve modification of behaviour a t a speed close to the robot’s operational speed. We show how the layered architecture interfaces to the original on-board architecture, which provided sophisticated localisation but no ability to deal with environmental exceptions.