A Navigation Framework for Multiple Mobile Robots and its Application

This paper presents a navigation framework which enables multiple mobile robots to attain individual goals, coordinate their actions and work safely and reliably in a highly dynamic environment. We give an overview of the framework architecture, its layering and the subsystems reactive obstacle avoidance, local path planning, global path planning, multi-robot planning and localization. The latter receives particular attention as the localization problem is a key issue for navigation in unmodified and difficult environments. The framework permits a lightweight implementation on a fully autonomous robot. This is the result of a design effort striving for compact representations and computational efficiency. The experimental testbed was the "Robotics" pavilion at the Swiss National Exhibition Expo.02 where ten fully autonomous robots were interacting with more than half a million visitors during a five-month period on 3316 km.

[1]  Huosheng Hu,et al.  Dynamic global path planning with uncertainty for mobile robots in manufacturing , 1997, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[2]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  A hybrid collision avoidance method for mobile robots , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[3]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Multisensor on-the-fly localization: : Precision and reliability for applications , 2001, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[4]  Trey Smith,et al.  A Layered Architecture for Coordination of Mobile Robots , 2002 .

[5]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Real-time obstacle avoidance for polygonal robots with a reduced dynamic window , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[6]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  An Affective Mobile Robot Educator with a Full-Time Job , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[7]  Michael Drumheller,et al.  Mobile Robot Localization Using Sonar , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[8]  Dirk John,et al.  A mobile robot platform for assistance and entertainment , 2001 .

[9]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Feature extraction and scene interpretation for map-based navigation and map building , 1998, Other Conferences.

[10]  S.J. Vestli,et al.  Operating experiences with the service robot MOPS , 1999, 1999 Third European Workshop on Advanced Mobile Robots (Eurobot'99). Proceedings (Cat. No.99EX355).

[11]  Oliver Brock,et al.  High-speed navigation using the global dynamic window approach , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[12]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva , 2000, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[13]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Smooth and efficient obstacle avoidance for a tour guide robot , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[14]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  The dynamic window approach to collision avoidance , 1997, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[15]  Yakov Bar-Shalom,et al.  Multitarget-Multisensor Tracking: Principles and Techniques , 1995 .

[16]  Erann Gat,et al.  Experiences with an architecture for intelligent, reactive agents , 1997, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[17]  José A. Castellanos,et al.  Mobile Robot Localization and Map Building , 1999 .

[18]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Designing a secure and robust mobile interacting robot for the long term , 2003 .

[19]  W. Eric L. Grimson,et al.  Localizing Overlapping Parts by Searching the Interpretation Tree , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[20]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Experiences with an Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[21]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Robot motion planning , 1970, The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science.

[22]  Karen Zita Haigh,et al.  A layered architecture for office delivery robots , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[23]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Feature-based multi-hypothesis localization and tracking for mobile robots using geometric constraints , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[24]  R. Sedgewick,et al.  Algorithms (2nd ed.) , 1988 .

[25]  José A. Castellanos,et al.  Mobile Robot Localization and Map Building: A Multisensor Fusion Approach , 2000 .

[26]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Elastic bands: connecting path planning and control , 1993, [1993] Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[27]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  The interactive autonomous mobile system RoboX , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.