McKendrick, John DeMilly.

The problem of finding optimal paths for a robot navigating in an environment where the position of each obstacle is precisely known has received much attention in the literature, however, the majority of applications problems for a robot would require it to navigate in a completely unknown. This paper focuses on an approach to solving the problem of robot navigation in an unknown, unstructured, two-dimensional environment where the positions of the polygonal obstacles were fixed in time. Few studies have reported on the utilization of an expert system to govern robot motion. This study relied on a knowledge-based expert system that interacted with lower-level procedures to carry out path finding and exploration functions. The expert-system shell used was OPS5 which ran on top of Lisp.