Achieving autonomous navigation in ground robotic vehicles

A long-held dream for robotics researchers is the creation of vehicles that can move to a goal without human supervision, adapting as required to changing circumstances. While today’s ground robots are still far from achieving such complete autonomy, substantial progress has been attained. In this paper we describe the state-of-the-art in autonomous ground vehicle navigation as observed in the recently completed DARPA PerceptOR program, and we suggest new research directions where we see opportunities for leaps in performance.