Autonomous mobile robots need very reliable navigation capabilities in order to operate unattended for long periods of time. This paper reports on first results of a research program that uses partially observable Markov models to robustly track a robot's location in office environments and to direct its goal-oriented actions. The approach explicitly maintains a probability distribution over the possible locations of the robot, taking into account various sources of uncertainty, including approximate knowledge of the environment, and actuator and sensor uncertainty. A novel feature of our approach is its integration of topological map information with approximate metric information. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach in controlling an actual indoor mobile robot navigating corridors. 1 Introduction We are interested in the task of long-term autonomous navigation in an office environment (with corridors, foyers, and rooms). While the state of the art in autonomous office nav...

This paper describes the dynamic window approach to reactive collision avoidance for mobile robots equipped with synchro-drives. The approach is derived directly from the motion dynamics of the robot and is therefore particularly well-suited for robots operating at high speed. It differs from previous approaches in that the search for commands controlling the translational and rotational velocity of the robot is carried out directly in the space of velocities. The advantage of our approach is that it correctly and in an elegantway incorporates the dynamics of the robot. This is done by reducing the search space to the dynamic window, which consists of the velocities reachable within a short time interval. Within the dynamic window the approach only considers admissible velocities yielding a trajectory on which the robot is able to stop safely. Among these velocities the combination of translational and rotational velocity is chosen by maximizing an objective function. The objective function includes a measure of progress towards a goal location, the forward velocity of the robot, and the distance to the next obstacle on the trajectory. In extensive experiments the approach presented here has been found to safely control our mobile robot RHINO with speeds of up to 95 cm/sec, in populated and dynamic environments.

This article describes the software architecture of an autonomous, interactive tour-guide robot. It presents a modular and distributed software architecture, which integrates localization, mapping, collision avoidance, planning, and various modules concerned with user interaction and Web-based telepresence. At its heart, the software approach relies on probabilistic computation, on-line learning, and any-time algorithms. It enables robots to operate safely, reliably, and at high speeds in highly dynamic environments, and does not require any modifications of the environment to aid the robot's operation. Special emphasis is placed on the design of interactive capabilities that appeal to people's intuition. The interface provides new means for human-robot interaction with crowds of people in public places, and it also provides people all around the world with the ability to establish a "virtual telepresence" using the Web. To illustrate our approach, results are reported obtained in mid-...

Many applications in mobile robotics require the safe execution of a collision-free motion to a goal posi-tion. Planning approaches are well suited for achiev-ing a goal position in known static environments, while real-time obstacle avoidance methods allow re-active motion behavior in dynamic and unknown en-vironments. This paper proposes the global dynamic window approach as a generatlization of the dynamic window approach. It combines methods from motion planning and real-time obstacle avoidance to result in a framework that allows robust execution of high-velocity, goal-directed, reactive motion for a mobile robot in unknown and dynamic environments. The global dynamic window approach is applicable to non-holonomic and holonomic mobile robots. 1

Autonomous mobile robots need very reliable navigation capabilities in order to operate unattended for long periods of time. We have developed an approach that uses partially observable Markov models to robustly track a robot’s location and integrates it with a planning and execution monitoring approach that uses this information to control the robot’s actions. The approach explicitly maintains a probability distributionover the possiblelocations of the robot, taking into account various sources of uncertainty, including approximate knowledge of the environment, actuator uncertainty, and sensor noise. A novel feature of our approach is its integration of topological map information with approximate metric information. We demonstrate the reliability of this approach, especially its ability to smoothly recover from errors in sensing. 1.

Whenever robots are installed in populated environments, they need appropriate techniques to avoid collisions with unexpected obstacles. Over the past years several reactive techniques have been developed that use heuristic evaluation functions to choose appropriate actions whenever a robot encounters an unforeseen obstacle. Whereas the majority of these approaches determines only the next steering command, some additionally consider sequences of possible poses. However, they generally do not consider sequences of actions in the velocity space. Accordingly, these methods are not able to slow down the robot early enough before it has to enter a narrow passage. In this paper we present a new approach that integrates path planning with sensor-based collision avoidance. Our algorithm simultaneously considers the robot's pose and velocities during the planning process. We employ different strategies to deal with the huge state space that has to be explored. Our method has been implemented and tested on real robots and in simulation runs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our technique can reliably control mobile robots moving at high speeds.

Abstract — This paper proposes a hybrid approach to the problem of collision avoidance for indoor mobile robots. The DWA (short for: model-based dynamic window approach) integrates sensor data from various sensors with information extracted from a map of the environment, to generate collision-free motion. A novel integration rule ensures that with high likelihood, the robot avoids collisions with obstacles not detectable with its sensors, even if it is uncertain about its position. The approach was recently implemented and tested extensively as part of an installation, in which a mobile robot gave interactive tours to visitors of the “Deutsches Museum Bonn. ” Here our approach was essential for the success of the entire mission, because a large number of ill-shaped obstacles prohibited the use of purely sensor-based methods for collision avoidance. I.

We present a framework for analyzing and computing motion plans for a robot that operates in an environment that both varies over time and is not completely predictable. We first classify sources of uncertainty in motion planning into four categories, and argue that the problems addressed in this paper belong to a fundamental category that has received little attention. We treat the changing environment in a flexible manner by combining traditional configuration space concepts with a Markov process that models the environment. For this context, we then propose the use of a motion strategy, which provides a motion command for the robot for each contingency that it could be confronted with. We allow the specification of a desired performance criterion, such as time or distance, and determine a motion strategy that is optimal with respect to that criterion. We demonstrate the breadth of our framework by applying it to a variety of motion planning problems. Examples are computed...

This paper describes a framework for vision and motion planning for a mobile robot. The task of the robot is to reach the destination in the minimum time while it detects possible routes by vision. Sincevisualrecognition is computationally expensive and the recognition result includes uncertainty, a trade-off must beconsideredbetween the cost of visual recognition and the effect of information to be obtainedbyrecognition. Using a probabilistic model of the uncertainty of the recognition result, vision-motion planning is formulatedasarecurrence formula. With this formulation, the optimal sequence of observation points is recursively determined. A generated plan is globally optimal because the planner minimizes the total cost. An efficient solution strategy is also described which employs a pruning methodbased on the lower bound of the total cost calculated by assuming perfect sensor information. Simulation results and experiments with an actual mobile robot demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

Research in the planning and control of mobile robots has received much attention in the past two decades. Two basic approaches have emerged from these research efforts: deliberative vs. reactive. These two approaches can be distinguished by their different usage of sensed data and global knowledge, speed of response, reasoning capability, and complexity of computation. Their strengths are complementary and their weaknesses can be mitigated by combining the two approaches in a hybrid architecture. This paper describes a method for goal-directed, collision-free navigation in unpredictable environments that employs a behavior-based hybrid architecture with asynchronously operating behavioral modules. It differs from existing hybrid architectures in two important ways: (1) the planning module produces a sequence of checkpoints instead of a conventional complete path, and (2) in addition to obstacle avoidance, the reactive module also performs target reaching under the control of a self-organizing neural network. The neural network is trained to perform fine, smooth motor control that moves the robot through the checkpoints. These two aspects facilitate a tight integration between high-level planning and low-level control, which permits real-time performance and easy path modification even when the robot is en route to the goal position.