Experiments in reactive planning and control with mobile robots

A system aimed at controlling the actions of mobile robots in an indoor environment is presented. The main issue addressed is reactive planning: the system enables such robots to perform nonelementary tasks in an environment that unpredictably demands to adapt the robots´ actions. A control system dealing with this problem was implemented in the context of a representative motion task. A demonstration was carried out on one GOFER robot to test how effectively and reliably the system could achieve this task. The control system is composed of a planning module, written in the Action Network formalism, that governs various behaviors implemented with artificial potential fields or other specific control strategies. Both the system implemented and the demonstration are detailed