Development of mobile sensor terminals “Portable Go” for navigation in informationally structured and unstructured environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a navigation system of a personal mobility robot in informationally structured and unstructured environments. First, we introduce a group of robots named Portable Go, which are equipped with laser range finders, gyros, and omni-directional wheels. The Portable Go robots expand the informationally structured environment by deploying in the informationally unstructured environment in advance. Then, a personal mobility robot based on an electric wheelchair is guided by eleven Portable Go robots in the new informationally structured environment which is just created by the Portable Go robots. Through navigation experiments, we verify that the proposed system navigates the personal mobility robot from the informationally structured environment to the informationally unstructured environment smoothly by using the Portable Go robots.