Optimal Switching Surfaces in Behavior-Based Robotics

In this paper an optimal solution is presented for the problem of avoiding obstacles while progressing towards a goal for a single robot. In particular, the solution is obtained by allowing the robot to switch between a fixed number of behaviors and optimizing over what behaviors to use and when to switch between them. It is moreover shown that the structure of the switching law only depends on the distance between the obstacle and the goal. Hence, once initial simulations are done, a guard can be generated with a fixed structure, and, given that the robot knows the distance between the obstacle and the goal, it knows when to switch in order to execute the pre-computed (optimal) solution. Therefore the solution lends itself nicely to real-time implementations. Experiments moreover verify that the proposed methods transitions well onto a real robotic platform