Local perception maps and navigation for a mobile robot

Abstract

This paper describes a mobile robotics system that was implemented and is capable of building instantaneous representations of the free space available, and use those representations to perform navigation. The free space representations are done by means of perception maps specially designed to hold and combine ultrasonic data. Themaps are built by neural networks appropriately trained to minimise undesired ranging errors due to specularreflections; that is achieved by taking advantage of the redundancy of sensorial data. The concept of localnavigation is developed as a new navigation approach, and is based on full independence on the environment, relying purely on sensorial perception. Local motion is generated according to simple generic behaviour descriptions: the local navigation strategies. The system, which was implemented, guarantees a safe local motion throughout the environment, requiring no a priori information nor any pre-defined path to follow. An adequate navigation architecture integrates the local navigation module within a framework of other several modules for more complete navigation tasks. The results obtained are quite promising in pointing the way to an autonomous system.