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9 Topological Path Planning

Figure 9.10 A student testing an unidentified entry in the competition arena at the
1994 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition “Office Delivery” event. (Photograph courtesy
of AAAI.)

9.5 Case Study of Topological Navigation with a
Hybrid Architecture

This section presents a case study of topological navigation using the SFX
architecture in the 1994 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition by a team of un-
dergraduates from the Colorado School of Mines. The 1994 competition had
an office navigation event. 129 Each robot was placed in a random room, then
had to navigate out of the room and to another room within 15 minutes.
Entrants were given a topological map, but weren’t allowed to measure the
layout of the rooms and halls. This case study reviews how the topological
map was entered, the activities of the Cartographer, how scripts (discussed
in Ch. 5) were used to simplify behavioral management, and the lessons
learned.