Turning to align itself with the hallway, it begins to move toward the near door of the goal room, which is just a few feet in front. This run should be easy, so the robot thinks. DERVISH plans to use another hallway. DERVISH's brain is an on-board MACINTOSH Later, when the robot finally reaches the node just outside the goal room, the enterroom module is called. This simple procedure aligns the robot with the doorway and then moves a prespecified distance into the room.

DERVISH won the Office Delivery event of the 1994 Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conferennce on Artificial Intelligence. Although the contest required dervish to navigate in an artificial office environment, the official goal of the contest was to push the technology of robot navigation in real office buildings with minimal domain information. dervish navigates reliably using retractable assumptions that simplify the planning problem. In this article, we present a short description of Dervish's hardware and low-level motion modules. We then discuss this assumptive system in more detail.