Autonomous and navigation in a structured environment

The author describes a hardware and software system developed to perform autonomous navigation of a land vehicle in a structured environment. The vehicle used for development and testing of the system was the Jeep Cherokee Mobile Robotics Testbed Vehicle developed at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Since obstacle detection and avoidance have not yet been incorporated into the system, a structured environment is postulated that presumes that the paths to be traversed are free of obstacles. The system performs path planning and execution based on maps constructed using the vehicle´s onboard navigation system and map-maker. The system software, hardware, and performance data are discussed