Combining multiple robot behaviors for complex off-road missions

This paper gives an overview of the autonomous off-road navigation approach developed for the ground robot vehicle MuCAR-3. It integrates our approaches to goal-directed and GIS-data supported autonomous navigation, autonomous person and vehicle following and shuttling on a taught track into a single system. The perceptual prerequisites necessary to realize the different robot behaviors are presented in detail, and we show how the individual behaviors available to our robot are coordinated to solve the complex off-road mission of the mule transport scenario at the European Land Robot Trials 2010. Finally, we give an impression of the system's performance by analyzing the results obtained at the trials.