A General Platform for Robot Navigation in Natural Environments

A user interface for the remote control of vision-based robot navigation in previously unknown, indoor or outdoor environments has been developed. Visual feedback from the camera(s) of the robot is provided to the user, allowing him to select a visual target to be reached by the robot and launch an autonomous navigation process. Manual control can be taken back by the user at any time. The interface is built as a modular platform, capable of accommodating different types of robots and different algorithms for vision and navigation. There are hardware-dependent modules, whose purpose is to isolate the particularities of each robot from the rest of the control system, and must be implemented for each different robot to be used with the platform. Other modules are hardware-independent, and they implement generic tasks like landmark detection or path planning. Alternative versions of these modules can co-exist in the system, so that the user may select the preferred combination of them for each navigation task.