An autonomous mobile robot with fuzzy obstacle avoidance behaviors and a visual landmark recognition system

Multi-sensor fusion has been a hot topic in the field of robotics. Inspired by the modern philosophy's spirit, the behavior-based systems interact with the real world directly. In this study, a fully autonomous mobile robot is developed that extracts all its knowledge from physical sensors and expresses all its goals and desires as physical action to affect its environment. The control software implements behavior-based artificial intelligence, where the coordination between various sensors are realized by layers of several simple and primitive behaviors similar to those observed in animals. In the developed mobile robot, each module itself generates behaviors. Behaviors corresponding to different sensors have different priorities, where the vision system has the lowest priority, and the ultrasonic sensors and bumper sensors have higher priority. The effectiveness of the developed system is demonstrated by experimental studies.