Mobile robot navigation based on flexibility maps of the environment

Abstract

We propose a unified mathematical framework for local navigation and position localization of a mobile robot which is based on the use of flexibility maps of the environment. Flexibility maps contain both the current knowledge of the robot about the positions of objects as well as the information required to calculate its future path. The major benefit of our approach is that several navigation tasks in mobile robotics can be incorporated elegantly into a single mathematically well founded framework.