An Experimental Study of Anticipation in Simple Robot Navigation/The Benefits of Anticipation: an experimental study

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had the goal to shift places with each other. Four different approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were compared. The results indicate that the ability to anticipate the behavior of the other robot can be advantageous. However, the results also clearly show that anticipatory and planned behavior are not always better than a purely reactive strategy.