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Combining metric and topological navigation of simulated robots. (English) Zbl 1099.68750

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)
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