A behavior-based system for off-road navigation

Abstract

Absh.act--In this paper, we describe a core system for autonomous navigation in outdoor natural terrain. The system consists of three parts: a perception module that processes range images to identify untraversable regions of the terrain, a local map management module that maintains a representation of the environment in the vicinity of the vehicle, and a planning module that issues commands to the vehicle controller. We illustrate our approach by an experiment in which a vehicle travelled autonomously for one kilometer through unmapped cross-country terrain.

Terrain Classification Using Weakly-Structured Vehicle/Terrain Interaction

“…Elevation maps and vision techniques can be used to assess terrain for navigation. In (Langer et al, 1994;Simmons et al, 1995;Gennery, 1999), the authors employed similar approaches using elevation maps, which are derived from stereo vision or laser rangefinders, to assign a traversability measure within a grid map cell based on height, slope, height variability, and/or terrain knowability. A search algorithm generated an optimal path from these measures.…”

Path Planning for Formations of Mobile Robots using PSO Technique

“…In the virtual structure approaches is the entire formation regarded as a single structure where to each vehicle is given a set of control to follow the desired trajectory of formation as a rigid body (Beard et al, 2001;Lalish et al, 2006). In behavior based methods the desired behaviors are designated for each agent and the final control is derived as a weighted sum with respect to the importance of each task (for basic ideas see (Langer et al, 1994;Parker, 1998). These classical methods have been extended for maintaining of shape of formations using desired patterns (Lawton et al, 2003;Balch & Arkin, 1998).…”

Reactive Control Using Behavior Modelling of a Mobile Robot

“…[12] A way to deal with the navigation problem is within behavior based navigation approaches. The main idea is to subdivide the navigation task into small subtasks.…”

“…The main idea is to subdivide the navigation task into small subtasks. Several behavior-based control schemes have been achieved inspired by the subsumption architecture of Brooks [13] [14]such us reactive behaviors defined by Arkin using motor schemes (Arkin [15][16] [17]); DAMN architecture presented by Rosenblatt et al [18][19] [12] in which a centralized module of votes provided by independent behaviors combines into a voted output and fuzzy logic approach to manage behaviors used by Saffiotti [13], Seraji et al [14][15] and others [16] [17]. [18] This framework provides an overview on the contribution of soft computing to the field of behavior based robot control, a hybrid approach is adopted using both neural and fuzzy logic methods to realize the specified task of reaching a goal with obstacles avoiding in a crowded unknown environment.…”