A FUZZY-LOGIC BASED EXTENSION TO PAYTON AND ROSENBLATTS COMMAND FUSION METHOD FOR MOBILE ROBOT NAVIGATION

David Payton and Ken Rosenblatt have proposed a command fusion method for combining outputs of multiple behaviors in a mobile robot navigati on system such that information loss due to command fusion can be redu ced. Using linguistic fuzzy rules to explicitly capture heuristics imp licit in the Payton-Rosenblatt approach, we have extended their approa ch to a fuzzy logic architecture for mobile robot navigation in dynami c environments, which is simpler and easier to understand and modify. We have also developed and empirically tested a new defuzzification te chnique for alleviating difficulties in applying existing defuzzificat ion methods to mobile robot navigation control.