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.

A physically based navigation strategy for sonar-guided vehicles

Abstract: A novel navigation strategy is described that employs a time- of-flight sonar system to guide an autonomous vehicle through an unstructured environment composed of specular surfaces. Collisions are...

Limbless locomotion: learning to crawl

Abstract: This research develops a general framework for teaching a complex electromechanical robot to become mobile where sequences of body motions alone provide progression. The framework incorporates a learning technique, physical modeling, metrics for evaluation, and the transfer of results to a snake-like mobile robot. The mechanism and control of a 20 degree of freedom snake robot is described and multiple gaits are demonstrated including novel non-snake-like gaits. This research furthers the design and control of limbless robots.

Mobile Service Robot State Revealing Through Expressive Lights: Formalism, Design, and Evaluation

Abstract: We consider mobile service robots that carry out tasks with, for, and around humans in their environments. Speech combined with on-screen display are common mechanisms for autonomous robots to communicate with humans, but such communication modalities may fail for mobile robots due to spatio-temporal limitations. To enable a better human understanding of the robot given its mobility and autonomous task performance, we introduce the use of lights to reveal the dynamic robot state. We contribute expressive lights as a primary modality for the robot to communicate to humans useful robot state information. Such lights are persistent, non-invasive, and visible at a distance, unlike other existing modalities. Current programmable light arrays provide a very large animation space, which we address by introducing a finite set of parametrized signal shapes while still maintaining the needed animation design flexibility. We present a formalism for light animation control and an architecture to map the representation of robot state to the parametrized light animation space. The mapping generalizes to multiple light strips and even other expression modalities. We demonstrate our approach on CoBot, a mobile multi-floor service robot, and evaluate its validity through several user studies. Our results show that carefully designed expressive lights on a mobile robot help humans better understand robot states and actions and can have a desirable impact on a collaborative human–robot behavior.

Reactive and the shortest path navigation of a wheeled mobile robot in cluttered environments

Abstract: We determine the shortest minimal in length path on a unicycle-like mobile robot in a known environment with smooth possibly non-convex obstacles with a constraint on curvature of their boundaries. Furthermore, we propose a new reactive randomized algorithm of robot navigation in unknown environment and prove that the robot will avoid collisions and reach a steady target with probability 1. The performance of our algorithm is confirmed by computer simulations and outdoor experiments with a Pioneer P3-DX mobile wheeled robot.