Experiments in autonomous navigation

The problem of goal-oriented navigation of an autonomous robot vehicle through a partially modeled unchanging environment which contains no unmodeled obstacles is discussed. This simplified environment provides a foundation for research in more complicated domains. Perception, planning, and execution of actions are integrated into a reactive system which reasons about landmarks that should be perceived at various stages of task execution. Perceptual servoing uses correspondences between image features and expected landmark locations to ensure proper plan execution and to maintain the relationship between the system´s internal model and the environment. This system is described, and experimental results which demonstrate the efficacy of perceptual servoing are presented