Robot navigation by conditional sequencing

We investigate the application of conditional sequencing to robot navigation. Initial experimental results indicate that very robust navigation can be achieved by layering a conditional sequencer on top of a set of simple sensorimotor behaviors. The approach is uniquely flexible, permitting very complex tasks to be programmed reliably in very short periods of time. The technique was used in the recent American Association of Artificial Intelligence mobile robot contest. All of the contest-specific code was written in three days by a single programmer. The robot turned in the best overall performance of any entry. In addition, we present the results of over ninety formal experimental runs performed under a variety of circumstances