Towards the Unification of Navigational Planning and Reactive Control

Abstract

The illusion that reactive and hierarchical planning methods are at odds with each other needs to be dropped. By exploiting each method's strengths, a synthesis of hierarchical and reactive paradigms can yield robust, flexible, and generalizable navigation. Psychological and neuroscientific studies support this claim. 1. Introduction The integration of knowledge-based navigational path planning and reactive navigation requires the confrontation of many difficult problems. It can be seen that each of these methods addresses different subsets of the complexities inherent in intelligent navigation. It is our contention that neither navigational approach is entirely satisfactory when taken in isolation, but rather that both must be taken into account for the production of an intelligent, robust, and flexible system. Navigational path planning without consideration for the difficult issues of plan execution leads to restricted usage in very narrow problem domains and/or extremely brittle m...