The illusion that reactive and hierarchical planning methods are at odds with each other needs to be dropped. By exploiting each method's strengths, a synthesis of hierarchical and reactive paradigms can yield robust, ...

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) that incorporate transport robots are currently dominated by the use of automatic guided vehicles. These AGVs generally require significant restructuring of the workplace in order for ...

Landmark recognition is a task required of many robotic systems. In this work, we examine the use of a constrained Hough transform used by a mobile robot to locate a docking workstation. This algorithm deals with the ...

In the past, mobile robots have been constrained to operate in either an indoor or an outdoor environment, not both. Special purpose representations and ad hoc sensor techniques geared towards tasks of narrow focus have ...