MOBILE ROBOTS

Abstract

Mobile robots must deal with unstructured environments in order to be general and useful. Current laboratory robots often use single approach to deal with unstructured environments: position sensing, environment sensing, planning, or mechanical design. Robust robots of the future will have to use combinations of all those approaches, and also handle the difficult problems of system integration. This article is an overview of the problems to be faced and of some of the more promising approaches being investigated.