A reactive robot architecture with planning on demand

In this paper, we describe a reactive robot architecture that uses fast re-planning methods to avoid the shortcomings of reactive navigation, such as getting stuck in box canyons or in front of small openings. Our robot architecture differs from others in that it gives planning progressively greater control of the robot if reactive navigation continues to fail, until planning controls the robot directly. Our first experiments on a Nomad robot and in simulation demonstrate that our robot architecture promises to simplify the programming of reactive robot architectures greatly and results in robust navigation, smooth trajectories, and reasonably good navigation performance.