Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Deliberative Optimization of Reactive Agents for Autonomous Navigation written by Anthony Douglas Jones and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work develops a type of reactive agent that navigates according to a steering behavior that is governed by the agent's preferences. These preferences are optimized during a deliberative planning phase, and the agent's trajectory can be recorded as a series of waypoints or encoded as the parameters governing its preferences. The agent behaviors are tested in realistic ocean environments, and their performance is compared against simple tracking and homing behaviors as well as against an A*-based path planner. The environmental model for testing uses historic oceanographic and bathymetric data in two regions of interest. The first region consists entirely of open water in the Gulf of Mexico, and the second region lies in the South-Eastern Caribbean, where it is obstructed by a chain of islands. The Gulf region has no obstructions but faster local currents, while the Caribbean region has slower currents, but obstructing land masses. In general the algorithm performs better than simple tracking or homing behaviors, but not as well as the A* planner. The algorithm shows its most promise in its simplistic encoding of mission behaviors that are much more complex than homing or tracking, but it falls short of replacing a synoptic mission plan. To explore the feasibility of physically implementing one of these agents, a simple Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) was designed and constructed, which relies primarily on commercial off-the-shelf electronics in a custom polycarbonate hull. During a field test, the ASV successfully carried out a series of simple 250-meter point to point navigation missions.