Environmental mapping by a riding bicycle for a navigation map of autonomous mobile robot

Abstract

Recently autonomous navigation technique for a mobile robot becomes very important. In a field of navigation, the technique for localization and mapping by laser range finder is one of the major interesting topic. In order to use the method, an environment map including navigation root is need to be prepared in advance. Then, it is necessary to travel the route once before to make the map and the route by a mobile robot which performs the autonomous navigation. In many cases, when collecting environmental data, the robot requires a person to be accompanied. When making a wide range of environmental map, the person needs to walk long distance, and the load of the person increases. Therefore, we suggest to use bicycle installed LIDER and ride it to get the information of environment of the map. By using the bicycle, it is considered that the cost and time to collect the information of environment becomes low and short. In this work, we report an experiment of mapping in riding a bicycle equipped with a laser range finder, gyro sensor and encoder, and an experiment of a navigation by a mobile robot with the map created by the bicycle.