A blind traveler walking through an unfamiliar environment, and a mobile robot navigating through a cluttered environment have an important feature in common: both have the kinematic ability to perform the motion, but are depended on a sensory system to detect and avoid obstacles. This paper describes the use of a mobile robot obstacle avoidance system as a guidance device for blind and visuall...

A method is presented for computation of obstacle boundaries in configuration space, with particular emphasis on time efficiency. Properties of configuration space transformations are presented in general, and these properties are invoked in algorithms that result in highly efficient computations. The approach depends on the definition of a set of primitives, which are themselves efficiently tr...

*1 Nagasaki Research & Development Center, Technology & Innovation Headquarters *2 Chief Staff Manager, Nagasaki Research & Development Center, Technology & Innovation Headquarters *3 Ship & Ocean Engineering Department, Shipbuilding & Ocean Development Division, Commercial Aviation & Transportation Systems *4 Submarine Department, Naval Ship Division, Integrated Defense & Space Systems Develop...

An autonomous mobile vehicle for indoor environment is described. The vehicle is based on three subsystems: a visual self-location module to determine vehicle location; an ultra-sonic based module for obstacle avoidance and a visual module to permit the vehicle to cross safety the doors. The prototypal vehicle is currently under test in our laboratory.

We present a novel method for automatically synthesizing road networks that are perceptually similar to given example road networks. Our algorithm can grow a new road network from an initial node or expand an existing network. For an unfinished node in the network, we search a set of candidate nodes in the example road networks that have similar node topology, and then find a best one by neighb...

This is the first installment of a two-part tutorial. The goal of the first part is to give the reader a basic understanding of the technical issues and types of approaches to solving the basic path planning or obstacle avoidance problem. The second installment will cover more advanced issues, including feedback, differential constraints, and uncertainty. Note that is a brief tutorial, rather t...

This paper presents a general description for obstacle avoidance algorithms which can also describe the obstacle avoidance style(walking habit) of moving objects (human beings).A complex sliding mode based obstacle avoidance is presented as a test method, which is learned and modeled by the above mentioned general description. The paper presents simulation results of the sliding mode based navi...

Control in behavior-based systems is distributed among a set of specialized behaviors. To achieve eecient implementation, behaviors exploit speciic assumptions about a given task and environment. Thus they become vulnerable to deviations that render these assumption invalid. Yet it is important to provide appropriate responses to unforeseen situations. We demonstrate that, using voting techniqu...