Intelligent control and decision-making demonstrated on a simple compass-guided robot

Abstract

The paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for Dom Dinis, a simple compass-guided robot built by the authors. This includes environment exploration, task planning and task execution. Environment exploration, based on repeating a reactive goal search, enables a progressive construction of a grid based map. Based on the (possibly incomplete) map, the robot is able to plan its tasks. The execution capabilities of the robot include exception handling. Essential to all these capabilities is the knowledge of the robot's position in the world. The position is computed based on tracking traversed distances and followed orientations. Orientation is given by a compass. Dom Dinis does not use wheel encoders at all.