Online Paper: Franklin-Agents97

Integrating Range and Object Data for Robot Navigation

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 office environment. The high level nature of the representation allows easy integration of task-specific navigation constraints. Results are given demonstrating how the system is utilized on our mobile robot, Chip.