Neuronal architecture for reactive and adaptive navigation of a mobile robot

A neural architecture that makes possible the integration of a kinematic adaptive neuro-controller for trajectory tracking and an obstacle avoidance adaptive neuro-controller is proposed for nonholonomic mobile robots. The kinematic adaptive neuro-controller is a real-time, unsupervised neural network that learns to control a nonholonomic mobile robot in a nonstationary environment, which is termed Self-Organization Direction Mapping Network (SODMN), and combines associative learning and Vector Associative Map (VAM) learning to generate transformations between spatial and velocity coordinates. The transformations are learned in an unsupervised training phase, during which the robot moves as a result of randomly selected wheel velocities. The robot learns the relationship between these velocities and the resulting incremental movements. The obstacle avoidance adaptive neuro-controller is a neural network that learns to control avoidance behaviors in a mobile robot based on a form of animal learning known as operant conditioning. Learning, which requires no supervision, takes place as the robot moves around an cluttered environment with obstacles. The neural network requires no knowledge of the geometry of the robot or of the quality, number, or configuration of the robot's sensors. The efficacy of the proposed neural architecture is tested experimentally by a differentially driven mobile robot.