Incremental and robust construction of Generalized Voronoi Graph (GVG) for mobile guide robot

Abstract

GVG has been effectively used as a sensor based navigation tool using 360/spl deg/ sensor data. For mobile guide robot applications, however, we can only use 180/spl deg/ sensor data and the robustness of the navigation algorithm is critical for successful applications. For that purpose, the robot should be equipped with three capabilities. Those are 1) incremental GVG construction, 2) robust GVG navigation and 3) navigation strategy that just uses half of the sensor scan, i.e. 180/spl deg/. In this paper, we propose a GVG navigation algorithm that has above 3 capabilities. We firstly propose a method that can estimate the invisible 180/spl deg/ range from previous range data. Moreover, we suggest a way of robust GVG navigation algorithm by using a sensor data matching technique. The simulation result validates that the proposed algorithm can incrementally and robustly navigate the semi-unstructured map by using 180/spl deg/ sensor scan.