Implementation of a reactive autonomous navigation system on an outdoor mobile robot

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Introduction
System Architecture
Vehicle Layer
The vehicle level contains the vehicle hardware and control software for MAVERIC (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2:
The last section of this paper describes the demonstration scenario that we devised to test the system architecture and the execution and results results that This research was sponsored by DARPA under contract DAAE-07-92-C-R012. 1
MAVERIC, the autonomous testbed cart.
MAVERIC is an electric golf cart that contains a 486 PC to perform low level vehicle control, a DataCube hooked up to a CCD camera to grab images, wheel encoders to calculate distance traveled, and a SUN IPX which runs a reactive planner and navigation behaviors. The control software on the PC is in charge of reading the wheel encoders, issuing commands to the CCD camera to position it, issuing commands to three actuators to control steering, breaking, and acceleration, and sending and receiving commands and data from the Sun workstation.
Introduction
Figure 1:
System Architecture.
we obtained. We will summarize by describing additional work performed on the system and future plans of where we want to improve the architecture.
IMPLEMENTATION OF A REACTIVE AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION SYSTEM ON AN OUTDOOR MOBILE ROBOT Patrick G. Kenny, Clint R. Bidlack, Karl C. Kluge, Jaeho Lee, Marcus J. Huber, Edmund H. Durfee and Terrr
The behavior layer contains all of the available perception and navigation behaviors. The perception behaviors that were implemented on the vehicle consisted of a road follower and a visual landmark detection system. The road following behavior was an implementation of the YARF road follower. This implementation was di erent from the original in that it was changed to follow sidewalks and not two lane roads, as the original YARF was designed to follow. The visual landmark detection system was designed to detect orange highway cones. It was capable of tracking the cones from frame to frame and calculating the distance and orientation relative to the vehicle. Other available behaviors that were implemented on the vehicle were; cross country navigation to a visible landmark, and driving a speci c arc.
Arti cial Intelligence Laboratory The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2110
Researchers at the University of Michigan's AI Lab are working to produce mobile robot systems capable of intelligently reacting to events and objects in a real world environment. A system has been built which integrates a reactive planner with perception and navigation capabilities in order to generate exible, responsive vehicle behavior. The system architecture consists of four layers; The vehicle control layer, the behavior control layer, the manager layer and the planner layer. This system design was implemented on a outdoor mobile robot. Results have shown that the robot, using this architecture, is able to perform reactive autonomous navigation in an outdoor environment. As part of the work for the Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) project The University of Michigan AI Lab built an outdoor mobile robot named MAVERIC (see Figure 2). This mobile robot is being used as a testbed for work in planning, navigation, and information assimilation for single agent and multi agent experiments. Researchers at the AI Lab implemented an architecture on MAVERIC which integrates a reactive planner with perception and navigation capabilities in order to generate exible, responsive, vehicle behavior. The rst section of this paper describes the system architecture that was implemented on MAVERIC, the outdoor mobile robot. The architecture was divided into four levels, where the bottom level consisted of the vehicle control, the middle two levels contained the available behaviors and behavior control and the top level contained a reactive planning system.
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Mode Manager The mode manager has several jobs in the system, these are: Control - The mode manager is in charge of turning on and o vehicle behaviors based on messages sent from the planner. Sensor Flow - The mode manager controls the ow of data from sensors to behaviors and the world model. This data could be values from the wheel encoders that tell the distance the vehicle has travelled, Boolean values that tell if a landmark has been detected, or if the vehicle is on the road or not. Other data would be Images that were grabbed from the DataCube that need to be used be the road follower and landmark detection processes. Transitions - The mode manager controls the transitions from one navigation behavior to another. The command as to which behavior to invoke would be issued by the UM-PRS planner. The mode manager would be in charge of switching out the currently running behavior and running a new one. For example, a transition from road following to cross country navigation would require that the vehicle come to a stop, the road follower to stop grabbing images, and the cross-country navigation and landmark detection behaviors start up and grab images. The vehicle could then resume moving. The vehicle could continue moving while the behaviors transitioned if the transition was make smoothly. World Model The World Model contains information about landmarks detected by the perception routines, currently running behaviors, the current mode the mode manager is in, and the current vehicle state. Information that is to be stored in the world model is explicitly dened before the mission. With the addition of an Information Assimilation component, dynamic queries could be made. All of the processes in the system have access to the world model. For example if a distance behavior was invoked by the planner to keep track of the wheel encoders, the data from the behavior would be deposited into the world model, the planner then could make queries to the world model as to distance travelled when it needed the information and not be bombarded with the information every cycle from the distance behavior. The planner uses the data retrieved from the world model to check the current context of the world; this context is used to determine which behaviors the system should be running. The planning layer of the system architecture consists of an implementation of the Procedural Reasoning System planner (PRS) developed at SRI. Our implementation was called The University of Michigan Procedural Reasoning System (UM-PRS). PRS is well suited for robotic applications, because it allows robots to pursue long-term goals by adopting pieces of relevant procedures based on the context rather then