Route-Based Robot Navigation

The ability to navigate in known and unknown environments belongs to the key skills of today’s mobile robots. Especially in structured environments, characteristics of the robot’s surroundings can be used to simplify the task. In many everyday scenarios, routes constitute a good representative of the structural nature of the robot’s world. In addition, a route description is an adequate means to specify the robot’s locomotion. This article recapitulates the experiences and findings with respect to the route-based navigation of mobile robots resulting from the work of the Bremen project “Robot Navigation” within the framework of the priority program “Spatial Cognition” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).