Navigation for Indoor Robot: Straight Line Movement via Navigator

Abstract

Due to the need of zigzag overlay strategy, long-term linear motion is essential for sweep robot. However, the existing indoor sweep robot navigation algorithm has many problems; for instance, algorithm with high complexity demands high hardware performance and is incapable of working at night. To overcome those problems, in this paper, a new method for indoor robot Straight Line Movement via Navigator (SLMN) is proposed to ensure long linear motion of robot with an acceptable error threshold and realize multiroom navigation. Firstly, in a short time, robot runs a suitable distance when it is covered by navigator’s ultrasonic sensor. We can obtain a triangle with twice the distance between navigator and robot and the distance of robot motion. The forward angle of the robot can be conveniently obtained by the trigonometric functions. Comparing the robot’s current angle with expected angle, the robot could correct itself and realize the indoor linear navigation. Secondly, discovering dozens of the magnitude gaps between the distance of robot run and the distance between navigator and robot, we propose an optimized method using approximate scaling which increases efficiency by nearly 70.8%. Finally, to realize multiroom navigation, we introduce the conception of the depth-first search stack and a unique encode rule on rooms and navigators. It is proved by extensive quantitative evaluations that the proposed method realizes indoor full coverage at a lower cost than other state-of-the-art indoor vision navigation schemes, such as ORB-SLAM.