Ordering Robotic Navigational Tasks in Household Environment

Autonomous navigation is an essential component of an indoor mobile robot for elderly care. For an interactive user experience the robot should be able to understand multiple navigational tasks and perform them as optimally as possible. User may issue multiple random destinations to the robot to reach in a scenario like finding the elderly person, but to navigate randomly may result in an inefficient robot manoeuvring and may delay the process of finding the elderly person in the environment. To enhance the navigational efficiency, ordered and organised navigation based on certain cost function is required. In this paper, we are focusing on the need of organisation of navigational tasks keeping in view the unstructured and dynamic nature of the home environment. To achieve speed and accuracy in navigation, a detailed representation of the environment and a better evaluation of the cost function to organise the tasks is required. Navigation is based on the grid map generated using laser scanner mounted on the small sized indoor robot, ARTOS. The cost function that is used for organising the navigational tasks is based on the A* algorithm that uses the grid map to determine the path to the destination. Keywords-Assisted Living; Indoor Robot; Autonomous Navigation; Ordering of Navigational Tasks;