Target-oriented mobile robot behaviors for office navigation tasks

Abstract

In the future, autonomous mobile robots will provide services in human's daily life. In the long run, these robots should be acting in the normal private or working environments of humans. Autonomy is one important aspect in the design of such robots because the robots should be able to act reasonably in changing environments. Robot control architectures based on local reactive behaviors have been established for supporting autonomy of mobile robots and have been successfully applied in laboratory and edutainment environments. When being used in human's private or working environments, safety (e.g. strict collision avoidance) and target-orientation are further major requirements on a mobile robot. Target-orientation means that the robot should, besides reacting on its immediate local environment, also be able to pursue long term targets such as reaching a certain destination. The work reported in this paper investigates the use of a behavior-based architecture on a mobile robot for making the robot applicable in a normal office environment. Complex behaviors for acting in this environment are being developed and are combined in a target-oriented way, thus overcoming the limitations of pure local reactivity. Experiments show the feasibility of the approach.

A biologically inspired method for robot navigation in a cluttered environment

“…The research on wheeled mobile robot navigation with obstacle avoidance has gained a great deal of interest over the past few years. Mobile robots have been used to solve different encountered problems and replace, augment or support human activities in several indoor or outdoor applications, such as factory and mining automation, 40 home and office assistance, 14 interactive guide system in museums, 16 search and rescue operations, 48 exploration in hazardous environments, 20 and military systems 47 . In all of these applications since the safety of the mobile robot and the people around are of prime importance, the robot should be equipped with a navigation system which combines a guidance strategy that guides the robot toward a target, with a collision avoidance technique, which leads the robot safely around an obstacle.…”