Navigation templates: enhancements, extensions, and experiments

Enhancements and extensions to M.G. Slack´s (1993) navigation template (NaT) approach to mobile robot navigation. The NaT algorithm is a vector-field approach to navigation that does not suffer from local minima problems. A problem with phase I of the local vector-field calculation algorithm (which would occasionally cause the robot to collide with an obstacle) is corrected. A simple method for using NaTs to control robots with nonholonomic constraints is presented. A series of experiments that demonstrate the utility of the approach on both a real robot and a simulated real-world robot operating in outdoor rough-terrain environments are described briefly