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Carlos Albores Borja, Josep M. Mirats Tur, José Luis Gordillo · IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine · 2009
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) andmobile robots are developed to carry out specific tasks autonomously, ideally with no human intervention at all [1], [2]. These kinds of vehicles, whether AVs or mobile robots, has generated great interest in recent years, for instance, because of their capacity to work in remote or harmful environments where humans cannot enter because of the extreme operating conditions [3].We are differentiating amobile robot (designed from scratch for a specific task) from an AV (a commercial vehicle with proper sensory and control systems added so as to be autonomous). However, in the sequel, for the sake of simplicity, we will use indistinctly one or the other term. Several applications are found in the literature, varying from material transportation in a common industrial environment [4] to the exciting exploration of a far planet surface [5], [6].