Can Planning and Reactive Systems Realize an Autonomous Navigation

The major challenges facing navigation of an autonomous mobile robot and need to be addressed are stem from, incomplete and uncertain knowledge of the environment, unpredictable aspects of real environment and surroundings, sensor limitation and uncertainty of sensory information (range, resolution limits, noise and occlusions), uncertainty in the effects of the robot own action (imperfect actuators), the need to respond quickly to environment demand in which the robot has to operate at a pace dictated by the interaction with its surrounding (limits on computation time due to restrictions imposed by the environment). These issues are fundamental to autonomous systems that have to function effectively while navigating and interacting with unknown, unstructured and dynamic environment. Several approaches have been developed to address this important issue at various levels in mobile robot's control architectures. This paper discusses the main approaches in the field of autonomous navigation. It focuses on the challenges, needs, fundamental issues along with the requirements that enable a mobile robot to move autonomously, purposefully, reliably and without human intervention through unstructured real world environments that have not specifically prepared for them at design time. * Appeared at the International Symposium on Robotics ISR’99, October 1999 Tokyo, JAPAN. Pp. 683-690.. This paper reflects a private work done by the author.