Abstract: The European Community's strategic research initiative in information technology has been in place for seven years. A good example of the pan-European collaborative projects conducted under this initiative is PANORAMA: Perception and Navigation for Autonomous Mobile Robot Applications. This four- and-a-half-year project, completed in October 1993, aimed to prove the feasibility of an autonomous mobile robotic system replacing a human-operated vehicle working outdoors in a partially structured environment. The autonomous control of a mobile rock drilling machine was chosen as a challenging and representative test scenario. This paper presents an overview of intelligent mobile robot control architectures. Goals and objectives of the project are described, together with the makeup of the consortium and the roles of the members within it. The main technical achievements from PANORAMA are then presented, with emphasis given to the problems of realizing intelligent control. In particular, the planning and replanning of a mission, and the corresponding architectural choices and infrastructure required to support the chosen task oriented approach, are discussed. Specific attention is paid to the functional decomposition of the system, and how the requirements for `intelligent control' impact on the organization of the identified system components. Future work and outstanding problems are considered in some concluding remarks. !36
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