Adaptive Obstacle Representations for Dynamical Navigation

This paper suggests and supports a design idea for improving dynamical navigation: adding an intermediary, adaptive obstacle representation level between perception and repeller representations. We illustrate our idea with our specific example of an adaptive obstacle representation level, which cleanly integrates into multiple existing navigation systems, treating each perceived obstacle entity as a locally sensitive, obstacle-valued function that returns an obstacle representation upon which steering and obstacle avoidance are based. Moreover, other elements of the navigation systems remain unaltered, thus preserving and extending original design virtues such as behavioral flexibility, computational efficiency, and dynamic responsiveness. Extensive simulations, validated with tests of real robots, demonstrate that our new representations compare favorably to previously employed representations on measures of effectiveness within a tested scenario, robustness over varying scenarios and ranges of parameter values, and computational efficiency.