A LRF-based Teleoperated Navigation Method

This paper presents a teleoperated navigation method capable of frontier-based guidance, simulatneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and safe, autonomous return to the home position as needed. The proposed approach is primarily developed to navigate a mobile robot in certain situations where human access as well as visibility is very limited. While in operation, the pose of the robot is estimated by 2D SLAM technique and all information including the map and the pose of the robot is sent to the base station. Unlike a remote reconnaissance and control method using cameras, the proposed method uses a laser range finder (LRF), which enables the robot to be navigated in terms of map. Additionally, we propose computer aided guidance using frontier-based approach and autonomous return to home position to deal with communication loss which frequently occurs in real world. In this paper the performance and the usefulness of our method is demonstrated using a ground robot in artificial disaster areas with an implementation of a graphical user interface (GUI).