Path planning for the Cye personal robot

We describe the Cye personal robot, concentrating on its path planning and navigation. We start out with a brief description of the general problem, followed by more detail on the Cye robot. After that, we concentrate on the path planner, which uses a global potential field approach, combined with a novel optimization criterion. This ensures that the robot maintains adequate distance from obstacles, while finding an optimal path which incorporates partial terrain knowledge. This system has been in use for over five months, with approximately 200 installations. As we empirically show, it is robust and can handle dynamic obstacles and imperfect maps.