Integrating Range and Object Data for Robot Navigation ¤

Most sensors used for robot navigation fall into one of two broad categories: range sensors that give approx-imate distances to obstacles, and object-based sensors that detect and locate objects of speci¯c types. Each type of sensor does a good job of detecting certain kinds of obstacles, but fails to detect others. A ro-bust robot navigation system must be able to inte-grate data from both sources. We present an imple-mented system that combines information from range and object-based sensors into a single representation that is used to reliably navigate a robot through an o±ce environment. The high level nature of the repre-sentation allows easy integration of task-speci¯c nav-igation constraints. Results are given demonstrating how the system is utilized on our mobile robot, Chip.