Road following based navigation in park and pedestrian street by detecting orientation and finding intersection

Technologies of autonomous outdoor navigation are required for automatic porterage, transportation, and service robots systems. People can go through the town to get to desired building without using global positioning system. He walks by detecting his orientation and knows which street is on. And he finds the intersection and turns. In this paper, we propose the outdoor navigation method based on the road following with detecting orientation and finding intersection, which can work on the real world. We use two scanning laser range sensors, for obstacle avoidance and finding the edge of the road, and a magnetic field sensor. We describe the implementation of the system. And we show the experimental results of the system in park and pedestrian street of Tsukuba city.