Monitoring and co-ordinating behaviours for purposive robot navigation

This paper presents a new scheme of purposive navigation for mobile agents. The new scheme is robust, qualitative and provides a mechanism for combining mapping, planning and mission execution for a mobile agent into a single data structure called the purposive map (PM). The agent can navigate using incomplete and approximate information stored the PM. We present a novel approach to perform obstacle avoidance for a behaviour based robot. Our approach is based on using a physically grounded search while monitoring and co-ordinating behaviours. The physically grounded search exploits stagnation points (local minima) to guide the search for the shortest path to a target. This scheme enables our robot to escape from dead-end situations and allows it to deduce that a target location is unreachable. Simulation results are presented