Robots are increasingly operating in indoor environments designed for and shared with people. However, robots working safely and autonomously in uneven and unstructured environments still face great challenges. Many modern indoor environments are designed with wheelchair accessibility in mind. This presents an opportunity for wheeled robots to navigate through sloped areas while avoiding staircases. In this paper, we present an integrated software and hardware system for autonomous mobile robot navigation in uneven and unstructured indoor environments. This modular and reusable software framework incorporates capabilities of perception and navigation. Our robot first builds a 3D OctoMap representation for the uneven environment with the 3D mapping using wheel odometry, 2D laser and RGB-D data. Then we project multilayer 2D occupancy maps from OctoMap to generate the the traversable map based on layer differences. The safe traversable map serves as the input for efficient autonomous navigation. Furthermore, we employ a variable step size Rapidly Exploring Random Trees that could adjust the step size automatically, eliminating tuning step sizes according to environments. We conduct extensive experiments in simulation and real-world, demonstrating the efficacy and efficiency of our system.
@cite_17: This paper describes the software architecture of an autonomous tour-guideltutor robot. This robot was recently deployed in the "Deutsches Museum Bonn," were it guided hundreds of visitors through the museum during a six-day deployment period. The robot's control software integrates low-level probabilistic reasoning with high-level problem solving embedded in first order logic. A collection of software innovations, described in this paper, enabled the robot to navigate at high speeds through dense crowds, while reliably avoiding collisions with obstacles--some of which could not even be perceived. Also described in this paper is a user interface tailored towards non-expert users, which was essential for the robot's success in the museum. Based on these experiences, this paper argues that time is ripe for the development of AI-based commercial service robots that assist people in everyday life.
Building autonomous robots that assist people in human environments has been a long-standing goal @cite_17 and an appealing inspiration of research in robotics. Robots have demonstrated various levels of success but still face challenges.