A software architecture for mobile robot navigation

Directed sensing poses the problem of sensing in specific directions in synchronisation with robot motion while avoiding collisions with objects in other directions. The rebuild of an outdoor mobile robot, with the goal of mimicking a blind person navigating with echolocation, has provided the opportunity to experiment with a state machine based software architecture for landmark navigation. In this paper, we discuss the rebuild of the robot, the software architecture and an initial experiment in collision avoidance.