A comparison of various robotic control architectures for autonomous navigation of mobile robots

For mobile robots, the most fundamental and pressing issue is that of autonomous navigation. Successful navigation of mobile robots is closely dependent on four vitals i.e. perception, localization, cognition and motion control. Implementation of each of these vital blocks requires consideration of at least one of the two well-known control architectures Deliberative Navigation Control and Reactive Navigation Control or a combination of the two, also known as a Hybrid Navigation Control. This paper compares each of these control architectures on the basis of their flexibility, ease of implementation, reactivity, robustness, efficiency and many other architecture specifications. The paper concludes with suggesting the schema that seems to be the best of each of these control schemes, on the basis of the analysis made, in order to cope with unknown and dynamic navigation problems encountered in real life scenarios.