Abstract

This paper concerns the application of techniques from estimation theory to the problem of navigation and perception for a mobile robot. After a brief introduction, a hierarchical architecture is presented for the design of a mobile robot navigation system. The control system for a mobile robot is found to decompose naturally into a hierarchy of control loops, where the levels are defined by the abstraction of the data and the cycle time of the feed-back control. The levels that occur naturally are identified as the level of signal, device, behaviour, and task. Estimation of the position of the vehicle with respect to the external world is fundamental to navigation. Modeling the contents of the immediate environment is equally fundamental. Estimation theory is provides a basic set of tools for position estimation and environmental modeling. These tools provide an elegant and formally sound method for combining internal and external sensor information from different sources, operating a...

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