Extending the Navigation Metaphor to Other Domains

Abstract

Navigation is one of the standard problems in the mobile robot domain. Here we describe how this was solved by one particular system developed at IBM. Wethen show how the same basic decomposition idea, as well as the specific control architecture developed for this task, can be ported to the domains of object manipulation and visual description. There are a numberof advantages to viewing these two new tasks as variations of the navigation problem.