Mobile Robot Navigation: The CMU System

Abstract

this article describes the current status of autonomous land vehicle (ALV) research at F Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics tute. We will (1) discuss issues concerning outdoor navigation; (2) describe our system's perception, plan- ning, and control components that address these issues; (3) examine Codger, the software system that integrates these components into a single system, syn- chronizing the dataflow between them (thereby parallelism); and (4) present the results of our experiments, problems uncovered in the process, and plans for addressing those problems. Carnegie Mellon's ALV group has created an autonomous mobile robot system capable of operating in outdoor environments. Using two sensors-a color camera and a laser range finder-our system can drive a robot vehicle continuously on a network of side- walks, up a bicycle slope, and over a curved road through an area populated with trees. The complexity of real-world domains and requirements for continu- ous and real-time motion require that such robot sys- tems provide architectural support for multiple sensors and parallel processing-capabilities not found in sim- pler robot systems. At CMU, we are studying mobile robot system architecture and have developed a navi- gation system working at two test sites and on two experimental vehicles