Team Theoretic Approach for Sensing Based Robot Navigation

An essential task for autonomous mobile robot is to move from places to places while avoiding obstacles and keep itself located. In a dynamically changing environment this requires the utilization of diverse sensor information. For mobile robots equipped with multiple sensors, diierent types of sensor and sensor conngurations provide competing and complementing functions for the above purposes. A hierarchical architecture with centralized sensor data fusion scheme lacks the exibility and is prone to overall failure caused by loss of single sensor or communication line. In this paper we address the problem of sensing based navigation by modelling various sensors as a team of experts cooperating to achieve a common objectives. Our approach is based on the team theoryy10] and the problem of coordination of sensor information for robot navigation is addressed.