Road-Following-Based Navigation in Park and Pedestrian Street with Finding Intersection and Orientation Detection

Abstract

Autonomous outdoor navigation technology is required for automatic porterage, transportation, and many other service robot systems. In case of people, one can go through the town to the destinated building without using global positioning system. He walks while detecting his orientation and knowing which street he is on. And he finds the intersection and turns based on his knowledge of the map. In this paper, we explain our outdoor navigation method based on the road following with detecting orientation and finding intersection, which we adopted in our robot for Tsukuba Challenge 2010. We have used two scanning laser range sensors, for obstacle detection and finding the edge of the road, to know the road area, and a magnetic field sensor to know the robot orientation to follow the proper path. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the system, and show the experimental results of autonomous navigation in park and pedestrian street of Tsukuba city.