Research Of Navigation System For Home Service Robots

With the development of robot technology, service robots have been applied not only in industrial and agricultural domains, but also in medical, entertainment and home environments; at the same time, people request for a more and more quality life, service robots can help people away from boring work, make them have more time and energy to do other things. The mission of the service robots can not accomplish without the support of navigation system, the main purpose of this paper is to attempt to give a solution for navigation problem of service robot in indoor environments.Indoor environment is a structured environment both has static and dynamic properties, a service robot in this kind of environment requires deliberation in the form of autonomous planning, at the same time, and it must be able to react instantly to unexpected situations. Based on hybrid deliberative/reactive paradigm, and the specific requirements of navigation in indoor environments, divides the navigation system into environment information gathering, deliberation planning, and reactive execution etc three modules.The gather and update of environment information is the main basis of path planning and behavior chosen, but the information of only one sensor gathered is not accurate enough, in practice, the data of multi-sensors usually need to be fused. This paper takes the sonar as research subject; apply Bayes method to fuse the data of multi-sensors, to minimize the uncertainty of the information gathered.Path planning is the basic step in solving robot navigation problem, and it usually needs two steps: the first step is the abstract representation of the environment, and the second is using some search strategy to find a path. In this paper, adopt occupancy grid as the environment representation method, and heuristic search methods to find a path. In order to verify its'effectiveness, make simulation experiments with A* and LPA* algorithm respectively.The main problem of reactive execution is the design of robot behaviors, according to the specific requirement of problem, designs the set of behaviors as avoid dynamic obstacles and move to goal etc two behaviors.Based on above researches, design a navigation system base on hybrid paradigm, and make thorough research on environment information gathering and path planning problem,which make a solid base for further research.