Development of an Integrated Mobile Robot System at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University), June 1988.

摘要

This report describes progress in development of an integrated mobile robot system at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute from July 1987 to June 1988. This program includes a broad agenda of research in the development of mobile robot vehicles, focused on the NAVLAB computer-controlled van. We built the NAVLAB mobile robot vehicle in our previous work under this contract, by outfitting a commercial truck chassis with computer-controlled drive and steering controls and a set of on-board computer workstations. The NAVLAB serves as a mobile navigation laboratory that allows researchers to interact intensively with the system during testing and execution. This year has seen a continued evolution and improvement of the NAVLAB mechanism, sensors, controller, and Virtual Vehicle interface to higher-level planning and perception software. Last year, as part of this research program, we designed and implemented the CODGER Blackboard system for robot perception and reasoning on a distributed collection of processors. This year, in response to our experience in using CODGER for mobile robot control, we have upgraded it to deal with geometric models and uncertainty in perception and map data. To control the NAVLAB and Terregator mobile robot vehicles, we developed the Driving Pipeline architecture last year for coordinating road following, obstacle avoidance, and vehicle motion control. This hardware and software is the basis for the New Generation System (NGS) for robot vision and navigation, which integrates many independent technologies to produce an integrated mobile robot system. (kr)