Biomimetic navigation using CBR

Abstract

Biologically inspired design consists in the creation of technological systems using as starting or inspirational point biological systems. Indeed, it has been used widely in robotics in different areas, such as mechanics, coordination or navigation. For example, in robot navigation, biomimetic algorithms can be specially useful in certain circumstances, such as when a robot needs to interacts closely with users. Using biomimetic navigation robot movements would be more similar to human ones but maintaining some basic navigation factors such as the safety. It is important in systems such as assistive systems in which human and robot control can be switch or combined –depending on the kind of system– to obtain the final command. Thus, in these systems interaction is very close to the user and it is advisable to make robot commands as similar as possible to the user ones. Otherwise, the user could even reject robot assistance depending on the disagreement between user and robot commands to reach a destiny. This disagreement provokes user’s frustration and stress and, in extreme, assistive system rejection. In this paper we propose a biomimetic navigation algorithm based on Case-Based Reasoning that learns from real traces –performed by volunteers– in order to achieve robot navigation as close as possible to the human one.