Angle-Based Methods for Mobile Robot Navigation: Reaching the Entire Plane

Publication Type:

Conference Paper

Authors:

Bekris, K.E.; Argyros, A.A.; Kavraki, L.E.

Source:

Proceedings of The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE Press, New Orleans, LA, p.2373--2378 (2004)

URL:

http://www.kavrakilab.org/sites/default/files/bekris_argyros_icra04.pdf

Keywords:

bearing-only navigation

Abstract:

Popular approaches for mobile robot navigation involve range
information and metric maps of the workspace. For many sensors,
however, such as cameras and wireless hardware, the angle between two
extracted features or beacons is easier to measure. With these
sensors' features in mind, this paper initially presents a control
law, which allows a robot equipped with an omni-directional sensor to
reach a subset of the plane by monitoring the angles of only three
landmarks. By analyzing the properties of this law, a second law has
been developed that reaches the complementary set of points. The two
methods are then combined in a path planning framework that reaches
any possible goal configuration in a planar obstacle-free workspace
with three landmarks. The proposed framework could be combined with
other techniques, such as obstacle avoidance and topological maps, to
improve the efficiency of autonomous navigation. Experiments have been
conducted on a robotic platform equipped with a panoramic camera that
exhibits the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed
techniques. This work provides evidence that navigational tasks can be
performed using only a small number of primitive sensor cues and
without the explicit computation of range information.