An evolutionary strategy for achieving autonomous navigation

An approach is presented for the evolutionary development of supervised autonomous navigation capabilities for small "backpackable" ground robots, in the context of a DARPA-sponsored program to provide robotic support to small units of dismounted warfighters. This development approach relies on the implementation of a baseline visual servoing navigation capability, including tools to support operator oversight and override, which is then enhanced with semantically referenced commands and a mission scripting structure. As current and future machine perception techniques are able to automatically designate visual servoing goal points, this approach should provide a natural evolutionary pathway to higher levels of autonomous operation and reduced requirements for operator intervention.