A method is described for generating plan-like, reflexive, obstacle avoidance behaviour in a mobile robot. The experiments reported here use a simulated vehicle with a primitive range sensor. Avoidance behaviour is encoded as a set of continuous functions of the perceptual input space. These functions are stored using CMACs and trained by a variant of Barto and Sutton's adaptive critic algorith...

A reactive navigation system for an autonomous non-holonomic mobile robot in dynamic environments is presented. A new object detection algorithm and a new reactive collision avoidance method are presented. The sensory perception is based in a laser range finder (LRF) system. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed local navigational system in unknown environ...

where the subscript S refers to the secondary criterion. The overall solution is then given by substituting (3) into (2) to obtain that have been applied include joint range availability [19], singularity avoidance [26], [39], various measures of dexterity [5], [8], [11], [18], [31], [40], [41], and obstacle avoidance [23], [39]. The homogeneous solution can also be used to optimize secondary c...

Robots and Humans have to share the same environment more and more often. In the aim of steering robots in a safe and convenient manner among humans it is required to understand how humans interact with them. This work focuses on collision avoidance between a human and a robot during locomotion. Having in mind previous results on human obstacle avoidance, as well as the description of the main ...

In this paper, we develop an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) system to provide safe mobility to the disabled or elderly people with cognitive and motor impairments. Our IW provides two main functions: obstacle avoidance and situation awareness. Firstly, it detects a variety of obstacles by a combination of a camera and 8 range sensors, and finds the viable paths to avoid the collisions of obstacles...

The Lane-Curvature Method (LCM) presented in this paper is a new local obstacle avoidance method for indoor mobile robots. The method combines the Curvature-Velocity Method (CVM) with a new directional method called the Lane Method. The lane method divides the environment into lanes, and then chooses the best lane to follow to optimize travel along a desired heading. A local heading is then cal...

Effective algorithms for modular self-reconfiguring robots should be distributed and parallel. In previous work, we explored general algorithms for locomotion and self-replication and explained their instantiations to systems in which modules move over the surface of the robot. In this paper, we describe the instantiation of one such locomotion algorithm to the Crystal robot: a distributed loco...

The NavChair assistive navigation system was originally conceived as an application of mobile robot obstacle avoidance to a power wheelchair. In this system, the user shares wheelchair control with obstacle avoidance and other navigation components. The philosophy of shared control has important implications for the design of these components. This paper discusses the development of navigation ...

We suggest that integration in robotics research is facilitated and enhanced by the process of building embodied robots. It is in the translation of conceptual and simulated models into hardware that the integration takes place. Further, multiple techniques that address similar aspects of the same robotic task have to be merged to achieve good overall performance. In this paper we present two e...

The CMUNITED-98 small-size robot team is a complete autonomous architecture composed of the physical robotic agents, a global vision-processing camera overlooking the playing field, and several clients as the minds of the small-size robot players. The global vision algorithm perceives the environment and processes the images, giving the positions of each robot and the ball. This information is ...