A critical challenge in the creation of autonomous mobile robots is the reliable detection of moving and static obstacles. In this paper, we present a passive vision system that recovers coarse depth information reliably and efficiently. This system is based on the concept of depth from focus, and robustly locates static and moving obstacles as well as stairs and dropoffs with adequate accuracy...

This work addresses path planning for nonholonomic robots moving in two-dimensional space. The problem consists in computing a sequence of line segments that leads from the current configuration of the robot to a target location, while avoiding a given set of obstacles. We describe a planning algorithm that has the advantage of being very efficient, requiring less of one millisecond of CPU time...

We present an efficient obstacle avoidance control algorithm for redundant manipulators using a new measure called collidability measure. Considering moving directions of manipulator links, the collidability measure is defined as the sum of inverse of predicted collision distances between links and obstacles: This measure is suitable for obstacle avoidance since directions of moving links are a...

This paper presents a simple and efficient approach to the computation of avoidance maneuvers among moving obstacles. The method is discussed for the case of a single maneuvering object avoiding several obstacles moving on known linear trajectories. The original dynamic problem is transformed into several static problems using the relative velocity between the maneuvering object and each obstac...

This paper presents a technique for an intelligent robot to adaptively behave in unforeseen and dynamic circumstances. Since the traditional methods utilized the relatively reliable information about the environment to control intelligent robots, they were robust but could not behave adaptively in complex and dynamic world. On the contrary, behavior-based approach is suitable for generating aut...

In this paper, we discuss the importance of recognizing and representing both stationary and moving obstacles for the purpose of autonomous driving as well as linking these representation to an ontology of obstacles to aid in deducing additional information about them. With the ability to access additional information about a sensed obstacle, an autonomous vehicle can better forecast where that...

We present an algorithm for planning coordinated motions of a pair of convex polygo-nal mobile robots moving in a shared two-dimensional workspace which contains polygonal obstacles. The algorithm uses a generalized Voronoi diagram as a skeleton of the workspace and searches for paths for which the robots remain on this skeleton except in certain regions which have high clearance from the obsta...

Let S be a set of disjoint obstacles (simple polygons) in the plane. We use n to denote the total number of their edges. Assume that we have a point robot moving on the plane and that it can “walk” on the edges of the obstacles (that is, we treat the obstacles as open sets). The robot starts from pstart position and has to get to pgoal position using the shortest collision-free path. In class, ...

We present an efficient and powerful algorithm for detecting openings. Openings indicate the existence of a new path for the robot. The reliable detection of new openings is of great relevance for the domain of moving objects [2] as a robot typically needs to detect openings for itself to navigate through. It is also especially relevant to the domain of Navigation Among Movable Obstacles in kno...