Reflex Navigation in Sensor space
Narongdech Keeratipranon, Frédéric Maire, Henry He Huang · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2007
Most existing navigation systems require a ground frame (2D Cartesian coordinate system) in order to navigate from a ground point A to a ground point B. However, it is more natural to navigate by reflex actions between the points in sensor space corresponding to A and B. In this paper, we show that it is possible to navigate by reflex action in sensor space when the components of the sensor vector are bearings of landmarks, and the reflex action is a gradient descent on the distance in sensor space between the current position and the target position. Our main result is a proof that except for pathological cases, any point is reachable from any other point by reflex action in the bearing sensor space provided the environment is free of obstacles. Although the robot’s trajectory generated by this method does not necessarily correspond to the shortest path on the ground, this approach constitutes a practical solution to a basic navigation problem for autonomous mobile robots.