Integrated Navigation of the Mobile Service Robot in Office Environments

This paper describes an integrated navigation strategy for the autonomous service robot PSR. The PSR is under development at the KIST for service tasks in indoor public environments. The PSR is a multi-functional mobile-manipulator typed agent, which works in daily life. Major advantages of proposed navigation are as follows: 1) Structured control architecture for a systematic integration of various software modules. A Petri net based configuration design enables stable control flow of a robot. 2) A range sensor based generalized scheme of navigation. Any range sensor can be selectively applied using the proposed navigation scheme. 3) No need for modification of environments. (No use of artificial landmarks.) 4) Hybrid approaches combining reactive behavior as well as deliberative planner, and local grid maps as well as global topological maps. A presented experimental result shows that the proposed navigation scheme is useful for mobile service robot in practical applications.