Hierarchical planning in a mobile robot for map learning and navigation

This chapter focuses on autonomous navigation for mobile robots. We propose a hybrid layered architecture, which is used to navigate in totally or partially explored environments using sonar sensors. Our architecture relies on a hierarchical representation of the environment, which has both a metric and a topological level, which is based on the metric level. High level planning layers work at the topological level deliberatively, while low level navigation layers operate at the metric level reactively. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is that it can operate in both known and unknown environments rapidly and efficiently.