This paper aims at giving an overview of the current issues in the area of Mobile Autonomous Systems. It is based on literature studies and site visits to leading research laboratories around the world, including Europe, the US, and Japan. Since research related to this field is vast, we have concentrated on issues that we believe form the fundamental base, some of which can be said to be well studied and far advanced, while others are such that researchers are still struggling to grasp them.
Inadae paper CVAP/we touch upon central issues of planning and obstacle avoidance, areas which are well studied and quite advanced. Even though interesting and unsolved problems still remain within these areas, we stress that there are other areas, that are less advanced, which need more attention. Sensing, perception, learning, reasoning, and knowledge representation are such areas, these are central to the autonomy aspects rather than the mobility aspects. We believe that when a breakthrough comes in these areas a giant step towards true autonomy has been taken.
Full paper: (PostScript 1.6Mb)