An Experimental Study of Anticipation in Simple Robot Navigation

This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had as their goal to shift places with each other. Four different approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were compared. The results indicate that the ability to anticipate the behavior of the other robot could be to an advantage. However, the results also clearly show that anticipatory and planned behavior is not always better than a purely reactive strategy.