Szabó, Richárd Combining metric and topological navigation of simulated robots. (English) Zbl 1099.68750 Acta Cybern. 17, No. 2, 401-417 (2005). Summary: Mobile robotics and robot navigation is a growing area of scientific research. Robot simulators are useful designing and analizing tools of this domain. Webots is a well-known representant of these programs, a three-dimensional mobile robot simulator. Various guidance principles can be developed in C/C++ or Java programming language with the use of Webots controller programs. In this paper a short overview is given about the problems arising in the process of the navigation, and a short taxonomy is presented about the possible problem solving methods. A brief introduction to the probabilistic navigation techniques concerning Kalman filter and expectation maximization is included with a special focus on occupancy grid.Formerly I presented a metric navigation method based on occupancy grid working in the Webots simulation environment [R. Szabó, “Navigation of simulated mobile robots in the webots environment”, Periodica Polytechnica – Electrical Engineering 47, 149–163 (2003)]. As a continuation of that research I created an enhancement of the former processes, a hybrid metric-topological navigation mechanism. A topologic layer is introduced in the environment exploration phase replacing the older value iteration. The implementation of a topologic graph of the explorable places using the metric map enables the robot to navigate in a more efficient manner. A comparison of the pure metric and the new hybrid methods is also given. MSC: 68T40 Artificial intelligence for robotics 68U20 Simulation (MSC2010) Keywords:robot simulation; probabilistic mapping; occupancy grid; metric/topological navigation PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{R. Szabó}, Acta Cybern. 17, No. 2, 401--417 (2005; Zbl 1099.68750)