The purpose of this paper is to explore a new way of autonomous mapping. Current systems using perception techniques like LAZER or SONAR use probabilistic methods and have a drawback of allowing considerable uncertainty in the mapping process. Our approach is to break down the environment, specifically indoor, into reachable areas and objects, separated by boundaries, and identifying their shap...

them. When I went into work, everyone seemed normal. Even the system we were going to use seemed ordinary—a fairly traditional architecture, a standard sense-modelplan-act cycle augmented with expectationgeneration and execution-monitoring steps. I thought this would turn out to be an ordinary project, but thinking this way turned out to be my undoing, especially when the sensor man showed up p...

The extraction of reliable features is a key issue for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation. Imaging sonars can produce acoustic images of the surroundings of the vehicle. Despite of the noise, the phantoms and reflections, we believe that they are a good source for features since they can work in turbid water where other sensors like vision fail. Moreover, they can cover wide areas increme...

In topological mapping, perceptual aliasing can cause different places to appear indistinguishable to the robot. In case of severely corrupted or non-available odometry information, topological mapping is difficult as the robot is challenged with the loop-closing problem; that is to determine whether it has visited a particular place before. In this article we propose to use neighbourhood infor...

This paper presents a vision-based obstacle avoidance algorithm for a small indoor mobile robot built from low-cost, and off-the-shelf electronics. The obstacle avoidance problem in robotics has been researched extensively and there are many well established algorithms for this problem. However, most of these algorithms are developed for large robots with expensive, specialised sensors, and pow...

The dynamical system approach to behaviour based robotics [8] provides a sound mathematical framework to behaviour design and integration. So far this approach has been used in various simulation work and in simple real world settings. This paper is a rst step towards application in a more realistic scenario such as a typical oÆce environment. The robot perceives its environment via a set of so...

We have developed a learning mechanism that allows robots to discover the conditional eeects of their actions. Based on sensorimotor experience, this mechanism permits a robot to explore its environment and observe eeects of its actions. These observations are used to learn a context operator diierence table, a structure that relates circumstances (context) and actions (operators) to eeects on ...

This paper presents a new sonar based purely reactive navigation technique for mobile platforms. The method relies on Case-Based Reasoning to adapt itself to any robot and environment through learning, both by observation and self experience. Thus, unlike in other reactive techniques, kinematics or dynamics do not need to be explicitly taken into account. Also, learning from different sources a...

This paper describes an overview of our semiautonomous (SA) wheelchair prototype and emphasizes the design of the perceptual navigation system. The goal of our project is to increase independent mobility of individuals who are wheelchair-bound and severely vision impaired, and the scope of the project focuses on developing the perceptual navigation system that is equipped with sonar sensors, a ...

The emphasis of the MIT SWAMSI effort has focused on utilizing high fidelity acoustic modeling of both scatterers and shallow-water environments to better understand and bound the limits of detectability for mine-like objects via autonomous networks of sensors, and the assess the performance of time-reversal processing for concurrent detection, classification, localization and Tracking (DCLT) o...