On the Error Condition that a Mobile Robot Arrives at a Neighborhood of Its Destination in Sensor-Based Navigation
Hiroshi Noborio, Takashi YOSHIOKA · Transactions of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers · 1998
A mobile robot usually estimates its position and orientation by a dead reckoning system. However under several kinds of uncertainties, e.g. inner/outer sensor errors and/or a slip, a mobile robot unfortunately misunderstands its true position/orientation in a real world as a virtual position/orientation in a computer world. Due to the difference, a mobile robot governed by sensor-based navigation sometimes gets lost in an unknown 2-D environment. On the observation, in this paper, we firstly improve previous metric sensor-based navigation algorithms in order for a mobile robot to deal with such uncertainties. Secondly, we name a class of errors homeomorpic error, where true and virtual positions in real and computer worlds are projected each other by the homeomorphism. Then, we theoretically show that improved metric algorithms never lead a mobile robot with the homeomorphic error to any deadlock (periodic cycle) in an uncertain 2-D world. Finally, we describe simulation results that improved algorithms guide a mobile robot with the homeomorphic error to a neighborhood of its destination surely.