Representing environment through target-guided navigation

Proposes an environmental representation, called a T-Net, a network of the path segments which reflects the structure of the environment. The robot iterates panoramic-sensing to find and estimate the skeletons of local areas, as well as their spatial relationships, through active navigation guided by selected targets. The robot represents the environment by a network of the skeletons which are used as the path segments for planning and navigating to a goal in real-time. Dynamic change often occurs in a real environment and the robot, thereby, detects such changes while navigating to a destination and updates the T-Net with alternative path segments if they are structural changes. Results of experiments using a robot with a real-time omnidirectional vision sensor are given.