Dealing with unanticipated events in autonomous navigation. [HERMIES-IIB]
In this paper, we describe advances to our mobile robot series (currently HERMIES-IIB) to include 8 NCUBE processors onboard (computationally equivalent to 8 Vax 11/780's) operating in parallel, and augmentation of the sensor suite with cameras to facilitate on-board vision analysis and goal finding. The essential capabilities of the expert system described in our earlier paper have also been ported to the on-board HERMIES-IIB computers thereby eliminating off-board computation. We describe a successful experiment in which a robot is placed in an initial arbitrary location without prior specification of the room contents, successfully discovers and navigates around stationary and occasionally moving obstacles, picks up and moves small obstacles, searches for a control panel, and reads the meters found on the panel. The success of this experiment encourages more complex on-board vision analysis and expert system control in dynamic environments. The experiment will be expanded to include research in robot learning as the robot attempts to adjust the meter reading to a particular value without a priori knowledge of the control panel system dynamics. 18 refs., 15 figs., 1 tab.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (USA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-84OR21400
- OSTI ID:
- 6010258
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-871211-3; ON: DE88000590
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 26. IEEE conference on decision and control, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9 Dec 1987; Other Information: Paper copy only, copy does not permit microfiche production
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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