Flexible Control of Mobile Robots through Autonomous Competence Acquisition

Abstract

A self-organising controller for mobile robots is presented that allows robots to acquire sensor-motor competences autonomously, and thus adapt to changes in the environment, the task, or the robot itself, without external supervision and feedback. Using artificial neural networks, the robot acquires these fundamental sensor-motor competences rapidly, in a couple of learning steps, taking a few tens of seconds. Results of experiments with a number of mobile robots are presented, both by us and by other research groups, using the same controller architecture. 1 c flU. Nehmzow, 1994 1 1 Introduction As mobile robot technology advances and sophisticated mobile robots become widely available, at comparably low cost --- the Nomad 200 robot described in section 4.1 of this paper being one example --- the question of how to control such robots intelligently has become more interesting, both from a research and an industrial point of view. Intelligent control here means that the r...