Target-oriented mobile robot behaviors for office navigation tasks

In the future, autonomous mobile robots will provide services in human's daily life. In the long run, these robots should be acting in the normal private or working environments of humans. Autonomy is one important aspect in the design of such robots because the robots should be able to act reasonably in changing environments. Robot control architectures based on local reactive behaviors have been established for supporting autonomy of mobile robots and have been successfully applied in laboratory and edutainment environments. When being used in human's private or working environments, safety (e.g. strict collision avoidance) and target-orientation are further major requirements on a mobile robot. Target-orientation means that the robot should, besides reacting on its immediate local environment, also be able to pursue long term targets such as reaching a certain destination. The work reported in this paper investigates the use of a behavior based architecture on a mobile robot for making the robot applicable in a normal office environment. Complex behaviors for acting in this environment are being developed and are combined in a target-oriented way, thus overcoming the limitations of pure local reactivity. Experiments show the feasibility of the approach.