Navigational system for mobile outdoor robots
Elisabet Rovira Forgas · 2010
This thesis discusses an approach to mobile robot navigation. It focuses on the creation of a navigational system based on free maps and the integration of the information gathered by the mobile robot into them. The motivation of this project is to take a step further in autonomous navigation. The key features of robot navigation are the representation of the world that surrounds the mobile robot, its localization inside that representation and finally the navigation within that representation. After doing some research on the latest mobile robot navigation studies, it was decided to modify an existing application that used open street maps. It was modified so it could be used to compute routes in real time using external information gathered by sensors. In order to compute suitable routes, localization was provided by a gps device and planning algorithms based on weighted graphs were used. The resulting application was succesfully tested and it is able to combine maps and externally provided information. It finds the most suitable route at any given time and for any GPS position according to the information stored.