A reactive architecture for planning and executing robot motions with incomplete knowledge

This paper describes a type of contingency-tolerant navigation system for an autonomous mobile robot performing transportation tasks in an office-like environment. A prior model of the environment is available, but this model is incomplete. The system combines a planning component that makes use of the available knowledge to plan a lesser-committed motion plan and a reaction component that pilots the robot according to this plan through the unexpected obstacles detected by the robot´s sensors. These two components embody practical answers to several important questions such as what a lesser-committed motion plan is, how it can be represented and used; and how computations should be organized so that the most common situations are handled quickly. The navigation system described has been implemented and a robot called GOFER tested on