Autonomous navigation in a manufacturing environment

Current approaches towards achieving mobility in the workplace are reviewed. The role of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and some of the preliminary work of other groups in autonomous vehicles are described. An overview is presented of the autonomous robot architecture (AuRA), a general-purpose system designed for experimentation in the domain of intelligent mobility. The means by which navigation is accomplished within this framework is specifically addressed. A description is given of the changes made to AuRA to adapt it to a flexible manufacturing environment, the types of knowledge that need to be incorporated, and the new motor behaviors required for this domain. Simulations of both navigational planning and reactive/reflexive motor schema-based navigation in a flexible manufacturing systems environment, followed by actual navigational experiments using the mobile vehicle, are presented