The Benefits of Anticipation: An Experimental Study

Abstract. This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had as their goal to shift places with each other. Four dif-ferent approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were com-pered. The results indicate that the ability to anticipate the behavior of the other robot could be to an advantage. However, the results also clearly show that anticipatory behavior is not always better than a purely reactive strategy.