Mobile robot exploration and navigation of indoor spaces using sonar and vision

摘要

Autonomous mobile robots need to integrate many different skills in order to perform complex tasks. In particular, they need to explore, sense, map and navigate in unknown or partially known environments. This paper describes a robot system that is designed to perform a find-and-deliver task in an office-building-like environment. The robot's initial orientation and location within the environment are not known, but the robot does have an a-priori map of the environment. We describe a sensor-based map representation that the robot uses while exploring its environment. We also describe how the robot determines its initial position and orientation within the environment, how it explores the environment for a visually-tagged object, how it recognizes the object and how it delivers the object. The robot also updates its map to reflect changes in the environment. While the entire robot system has not yet been integrated, each subsystem described in this paper has been implemented and tested...