The goal of mobile robotics research has been to establish effective ways for a mobile robot to navigate from one place to another. This thesis documents an experimental investigation into the use of vision for the navigation of mobile robots. The research presented in this thesis was directed at achieving qualitative navigation in an unmodified, unknown and dynamic environment. This thesis des...

This paper presents a navigation method for a mobile robot in urban environments. The navigation method employs a socalled Polar Traversability Index (PTI) to evaluate terrain traversal property along a specific direction and guide the robot’s motion. In the navigation system, a 2-D Laser Rangefinder (LRF) is used to produce terrain maps in various formats, such as 3-D point-cloud map, 2.5 D el...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe research to enable a robust navigation of guide robots in erratic environments with partial sensor information. Design/methodology/approach – Two techniques were developed. One is a robust node discrimination method by using an adaptive sensor matching method. The other is a robot navigation technique with partial sensor information. Findings –...

This paper proposes a method for the visual-based navigation of a mobile robot in indoor environments, using a single omni-directional (catadioptric) camera. The geometry of the catadioptric sensor and the method used to obtain a bird’s eye (orthographic) view of the ground plane are presented. This representation significantly simplifies the solution to navigation problems, by eliminating any ...

Robotic systems for water pipe inspection do not generally include navigation components for mapping the pipe network and locating damage. Such navigation systems would be highly advantageous for water companies because it would allow them to more effectively target maintenance and reduce costs. In water pipes, a major challenge for robot navigation is feature sparsity. In order to address this...

Robot navigation is one of the most studied problems in robotics and the key capability for robot autonomy. Navigation techniques have become more and more reliable, but evaluation mainly focused on individual navigation components (i.e., mapping, localization, and planning) using datasets or simulations. The goal of this paper is to define an experimental protocol to evaluate the whole navigat...

A general robotic mechanism was presented for in-pipe inspection oflevel pipes with varied diameter or curved pipelines. The robot employed three legs comprised of parallelogram linkages mechanism which enables adapting to various elbow joints in the piping systems. The curvatures in pipeline are the most important constraints in front of the robot through navigation process. To study the adapt...

This paper describes the integration of 2 0 stimulus-driven robot localization and positioning with a token-based correspondence method in a practical robot navigation system. The approach is interesting because it allows f o r modular acquisition and update of world knowledge f o r navigation, and robustness of navigation to low-level errors. No special marking of the world is necessary, so th...

Autonomous navigation of mobile robots in an uncertain and complex environment is a broad and complicated issue due to a variety of obstacles that mobile robots have to detect and represent in their maps to navigate safely. The objective of the navigation-mobile robot is to obtain an optimum path, meaning that the robot should plan a reliable path between the source point and the target point w...

| David Payton and Ken Rosenblatt have recently proposed a command fusion method for combining outputs of multiple behaviors in a mobile robot navigation system such that information loss due to command fusion can be reduced. Using linguistic fuzzy rules to explicitly capture heuristics implicit in the Payton-Rosenblatt approach, we have extended their approach to a fuzzy logic architecture for...