(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1989)
Arkin, Ronald C.
The illusion that reactive and hierarchical planning methods are at odds with each other needs to be dropped. By exploiting each method's strengths, a synthesis of hierarchical and reactive paradigms can yield robust, flexible, and generalizable navigation. Psychological and neuroscientific studies support this claim.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1989)
Arkin, Ronald C.; Vaughn, David L.
Landmark recognition is a task required of many robotic systems. In this work, we examine the use of a constrained Hough transform used by a mobile robot to locate a docking workstation. This algorithm deals with the uncertainty inherent in a mobile robot by making use of a spatial uncertainty map maintained by the robot. Several iterations of the Hough transform are run with transformed models of the dock. Votes are accumulated in a collapsed Hough space which, although unable to recover range and orientation information, simplifies locating the dock within the image.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1988)
Arkin, Ronald C.
Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) that incorporate transport robots are currently dominated by the use of automatic guided vehicles. These AGVs generally require significant restructuring of the workplace in order for them to be useful. The concept of flexibility in manufacturing is somewhat compromised by this strategy. Our previous work in mobile robots, resulting in the Autonomous Robot Architecture (AuRA), is applied to the manufacturing domain. This approach, contrary to the AGV methodology, embeds significant amounts of knowledge (both environmental and behavioral) to ultimately give a mobile robot far greater latitude in interacting with its environment. This paper presents the motivation and subsequent simulation studies that demonstrate the feasibility of migrating schema-based navigation into an FMS. In particular, the creation of a docking motor schema to accomplish interaction with the workplace is detailed.