Dynamical sequence of multi-sensor based tasks for mobile robots navigation

Abstract Though sensor based control provides a robust and efficient way of regulating robot's motion, it is usually restricted to local displacements. This limitation comes from the nature of the approach which consists of designing the controller as closed-loop regulation of sensory data relative to the local perception of landmarks. More complex displacements need then to be defined as a sequence of such elementary tasks. Each task being defined in terms of a particular vector of sensory data, insuring a smooth transition between them turns out to be a difficult problem. On the base of the task function formalism, we propose here a general approach to solve this problem. It relies on the definition of a differential structure on the space of generalized coordinates of the robot. This construction is made possible thanks to the introduction of a reference frame with respect to which all the tasks are defined. An application example is finally studied and simulated.