Integrating range and object data for robot navigation
David L. Franklin, R. James Firby · 1997
Most sensors used for robot navigation fall into one of two broad categories: range sensors that give approximate distances to obstacles, and object-based sensors that detect and locate objects of specific types. Each type of sensor does a good job of detecting certain kinds of obstacles, but fails to detect others. A robust robot navigation system must be able to integrate data from both sources. We present an implemented system that combines information from range and object-based sensors into a single representation that is used to reliably navigate a robot through an o#ce environment. The high level nature of the representation allows easy integration of taskspecific navigation constraints. Results are given demonstrating how the system is utilized on our mobile robot, Chip. 1 Introduction Navigating an autonomous robot can be viewed as a combination of three tasks: sensing the world, controlling the motor actuators, and doing some computation to determine how the...