Wall Following for Autonomous Navigation

Self-sufficiency in robotics motivates the need for continual improvement in autonomous navigation for mobile robots. Wall-following provides a simplification of 2-D navigation problems by providing a reference by which these problems are reduced to 1-D. A laser scanner for wall detection (abstracted as an active tangent/curvature sensor) is used on a kinematic unicycle robot, together with a controller inspired by [1] with an explicit representation of the wall as a planar curve. Reported experiments (performed using the X-RHex [2] robot) include straight wall trials to demonstrate the efficacy of the controller for a variety of initial conditions, as well as longer trials in more complicated environments including concave and convex corners up to and exceeding 90o.