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.

Vehicle navigation system with location-based multi-media annotation

Abstract: A navigation system provides multimedia annotations based upon the present location of the vehicle. These presentations may comprise advertising or text or other information entered by the user and associated with a specific location or locations. The navigation system also provides a removable media reader which obtains additional information based upon which the navigation system operates. This additional information may include multimedia annotations which are location-based. The navigation system further includes a wireless communication system which interacts with and provides further location-based multimedia annotations.

Visual map making for a mobile robot

Abstract: Mobile robots sense their environment and receive error laden readings. They try to move a certain distance and direction, and do so only approximately. Rather than try to engineer these problems away it may be possible, and may be necessary, to develop map making and navigation algorithms which explicitly represent these uncertainties, but still provide robust performance. The key idea is to use a relational map, which is rubbery and stretchy, rather than try to place observations in a 2-d coordinate system.

Robotic home assistant Care-O-bot ® 3 - product vision and innovation platform

Abstract: The development of a mobile robot to assist people in their home is a long term goal of Fraunhofer IPA. As a vision of a future household product, the latest prototype, Care-O-bot® 3, is equipped with the latest industrial state-of-the art hardware components and offers all modern multimedia and interaction equipment as well as most advanced sensors and control. Care-O-bot® 3 has been presented to the public on several occasions where it distributed drinks to the visitors of trade fairs and events. Current developments aim at applying the robot in an eldercare facility in order to support the personnel in their daily tasks.

Omni-directional vision for robot navigation

Abstract: We describe a method for visual based robot navigation with a single omni-directional (catadioptic) camera. We show how omni-directional images can be used to generate the representations needed for two main navigation modalities: Topological Navigation and Visual Path Following. Topological Navigation relies on the robot's qualitative global position, estimated from a set of omni-directional images obtained during a training stage (compressed using PCA). To deal with illumination changes, an eigenspace approximation to the Hausdorff measure is exploited. We present a method to transform omni-directional images to Bird's Eye Views that correspond to scaled orthographic views of the ground plane. These images are used to locally control the orientation of the robot, through visual servoing. Visual Path Following is used to accurately control the robot along a prescribed trajectory, by using bird's eye views to track landmarks on the ground plane. Due to the simplified geometry of these images, the robot's pose can be estimated easily and used for accurate trajectory following. Omni-directional images facilitate landmark based navigation, since landmarks remain visible in all images, as opposed to a small field-of-view standard camera. Also, omni-directional images provide the means of having adequate representations to support both accurate or qualitative navigation. Results are described in the paper.