Reactive Navigation through Rough Terrain: Experimental Results

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 10

Robot Navigation

This paper describes a series of experiments that were performed on the Rocky III robot. Rocky III is a small autonomous rover capable of navigating through rough outdoor terrain to a predesignated area, searching that area for soft soil, acquiring a soil sample, and depositing the sample in a container at its home base. The robot is programmed according to a reactive behavior-control paradigm using the ALFA programming language. This style of programming produces robust autonomous performance while requiring significantly less computational resources than more traditional mobile robot control systems. The code for Rocky III runs on an 8-bit processor and uses about 10k of memory.