Mobile robot navigation

About: Mobile robot navigation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 14713 publications have been published within this topic receiving 263092 citations.

STAIR: Hardware and Software Architecture

Abstract: The STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project is a long-term group effort aimed at producing a viable home and office assistant robot. As a small concrete step towards this goal, we showed a demonstration video at the 2007 AAAI Mobile Robot Exhibition of the STAIR 1 robot responding to a verbal command to fetch an item. Carrying out this task involved the integration of multiple components, including spoken dialog, navigation, computer visual object detection, and robotic grasping. This paper describes the hardware and software integration frameworks used to facilitate the development of these components and to bring them together for the demonstration.

Optimal navigation and object finding without geometric maps or localization

Abstract: In this paper we develop a dynamite data structure, useful for robot navigation in an unknown, simply connected planar environment. The guiding philosophy in this work is to avoid traditional problems such as complete map building and localization by constructing a minimal representation based entirely on critical events in online sensor measurements made by the robot. Furthermore, this representation provides a sensor-feedback motion strategy that guides the robot along an optimal trajectory between any two environment locations, and allows the search of static targets, even though there is no geometric map of the environment. We present algorithms for building the data structure in an unknown environment, and for using it to perform optimal navigation. We implemented these algorithms on a real mobile robot. Results are presented in which the robot builds the data structure online, and is able to use it without needing a global reference frame. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate how the robot is able to find interesting objects in the environment.

Map-based horizontal navigation in educational Hypertext

Abstract: This paper discusses the problem of horizontal (non-hierarchical) navigation in modern educational courseware. We will look at why horizontal links disappear, how to support horizontal navigation in modern hyper-courseware, and our earlier attempts to provide horizontal navigation in Web-based electronic textbooks. Here, we present map-based navigation - a new approach to support horizontal navigation in open corpus educational courseware that we are currently investigating. We will describe the mechanism behind this approach, present a system KnowledgeSea that implements this approach, and provide some results of a classroom study of this system.

Time dependent planning on a layered social cost map for human-aware robot navigation

Abstract: As robots make their way into our everyday lives, new behavioral concepts are needed to assure their acceptance as interaction partners. In the presence of humans, robots are required to take safety as well as human comfort into account. This paper presents a novel, planning-based approach for social robot navigation. It uses predicted human trajectories and a social cost function to plan collision-free paths that take human comfort into account. It furthermore employs time dependent, kinodynamic path planning to reason about human motion over time and to account for the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a robot. Our approach generates paths that exhibit properties similar to those used in human-human interaction, such as waiting for a human to pass before continuing along an intended path, avoiding getting too close to another human's personal space, and moving out of the way when blocking a human's path. In extensive experiments carried out with real robots and in simulation we demonstrate the performance of our approach.