Situation recognition for behavior-based mobile robots
Peter Veelaert, Herbert Peremans · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
In this paper we present a more human-like approach towards navigating a mobile robot. We maintain that navigation of a mobile robot always occurs within a certain context which we call a situation. Typical situations might be 'entering a corridor,' 'passing through a door,' 'seeking a goal,' etc. To approximate the navigation behavior of an intelligent agent in such a situation, we define generic situations as collections of pathways. Each pathway describes a possible path followed by that agent in that situation. We further assume that these pathways can be generated by observing a limited set of beacons associated with each situation. Hence, the robot will make use of relative positions only, distance and bearing of the beacons with respect to the robot and distances between the different beacons, obviating the need for an absolute coordinate system. To limit the number of pathways that need to be stored to describe a generic situation we propose a competition and cooperation algorithm. To show how this approach fares in realistic circumstances on a real mobile robot we include preliminary results with a triangulation based ultrasonic sensor system.