Manipulator control based on the artificial potential fields method has been shown to be a good solution for real-time obstacle avoidance and navigation in complex, dynamic environments. This paper presents an implementation of this approach for a Mitsubishi RV-6S industrial robot with an emphasis on the use for obstacle avoidance. The robot is able to perform simple navigation tasks while avoi...

Time-to-collision can be directly measured from a spatio-temporal image sequence obtained from an uncalibrated camera. This it would appear to offer a simple, elegant measurement for use in obstacle avoidance. However, previous techniques for computing time to collision from an optical flow have proven impractical for real applications. This paper present a new approach for computing time to co...

Service robotics is a new, emerging domain in robotics, characterised by enthusiasm, diverseness, and emerging industry. The paper presents modular and interacting obstacle avoidance, and navigation subsystems. The obstacle avoidance system is older, so there are practical experiences of its application to electric wheelchairs, which are explained. Ongoing work with the navigation unit is revie...

This work presents an approach to the obstacle avoidance problem, applicable in the frame of driver assistance. A decision, expressed as a proposed acceleration vector for the vehicle, is elaborated from the evaluation of a set of indicators characterizing the global state of a system of reactive agents (RMAS). Those agents evolve in a virtual environment produced on the base of vehicle’s perce...

The current research sought to construct a computational model of human navigation for virtual three dimensional environments. The model was implemented within the ACT-R cognitive architecture [1]. The navigation model incorporates visual search, encoding object features and spatial relationships, motion, obstacle avoidance, and incidental visual memory.

In an application where autonomous robots can amalgamate spontaneously into arbitrary organisms, the individual robots cannot know a priori at which location in an organism they will end up. If the organism is to be controlled autonomously by the constituent robots, an evolutionary algorithm that evolves the controllers can only develop a single genome that will have to suffice for every indivi...

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...

Most computer and robot vision algorithms, be it for object detection, recognition, or reconstruction, are designed for opaque objects. Non-opaque objects have received less attention, although various special cases have been the subject of research efforts, especially the case of specular objects. The main objective of this paper is to provide a research work in the case of semitransparent obj...

A planning methodology for nonholonomic mobile manipulators in the presence of obstacles is developed. The method employs smooth and continuous functions, such as polynomials, and it is very fast, easy to use and computationally inexpensive. The core of the method is based on mapping the nonholonomic constraint to a space where it can be satisfied trivially. In this paper, the method is first e...

This paper presents a novel method of combining topological and feature-based mapping strategies to create a hierarchical approach to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). More than simply running both processes in parallel, we use the topological mapping procedure to organize local feature-based methods. The result is an autonomous exploration and mapping strategy that scales well to l...