Natural Navigation System Design for Indoor Mobile Robots

Abstract

Natural navigation simply refers to free navigation without the necessity of tapes, magnets, reflectors, or even wires. Many autonomous vehicles possess this as world maps are readily available and provide a perfect basis for machine learning solutions. However, this is not so much the case for indoor applications. Here, paths are often dynamic and more constrained; therefore, requiring the continuous identification, mapping and localization of the surrounding area. This work focuses on developing an indoor natural navigation system; the localization is achieved with a fusion of the wheel’s odometry to the on-board Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU i.e., a combination of relative localization and absolute localization) using Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) as system’s encoder’s accumulation of errors is desired to be nullified while employing a PID control in correcting reference state errors. The map is simultaneously constructed using laws of geometry based on static points obtained from a Lidar, subsequently converted to an occupancy grid layout for effective path planning. In operation, tangency is applied in the avoidance of dynamic obstacles. The simulation results obtained in this study confirms the possibility of a simple, educational, indoor navigation system approach easily integrable by other mobile robots of the differential drive model.