TASK PLANNING FOR A MOBILE ROBOT IN AN INDOOR ENVIRONMENT USING OBJECT-ORIENTED DOMAIN INFORMATION

For a mobile robot to be practical, it needs to navigate in dynamicall y changing environments and manipulate objects in the environment with operating ease. The main challenges to satisfying these requirements in mobile robot research include the collection of robot environment i nformation, storage and organization of this information, and fast tas k planning based on available information Conventional approaches to t hese problems are far from satisfactory due to their requirement of hi gh computation time. In this paper, we specifically address the-proble ms of storage and organization of the environment information and fast task planning in the area of robotic research. We propose an special object-oriented data model (OODM) for information storage and manageme nt in order to solve the first problem. This model explicitly represen ts domain knowledge and abstracts a global perspective about the robot 's dynamically changing environment. To solve the second problem, we i ntroduce a fast task planning algorithm that fully uses domain knowled ge related to robot applications and to the given environment. Our OOD M based task planning method presents a general frame work and represe ntation, into which domain specific information, domain decomposition methods and specific path planners can be tailored for different task planning problems. This method unifies and integrates the salient feat ures from various areas such as database, artificial intelligence, and robot path planning, thus increasing the planning speed significantly .