Real time mobile robot navigation of virtually created environments

Abstract

Research in autonomous mobile robots is gaining much more attention in recent years, particularly in coordinating rescue missions and inspections of affected structures within disaster zones. It is the aim of this paper to contribute towards such advancements by introducing mobile robots navigation in virtually generated rescue mission environments. The randomly generated missions are mapped to real environments hosting mobile robots, which can unrestrictedly move in any open surroundings, without the need for the physical obstacles presence. To achieve this, a GUI was developed to randomly create missions of different sizes and complexities. The GUI offers the developer the choice of automatically generating such missions, edit them and/or create them. The robots may be programmed by various solving algorithms to complete the course and find a solution. The advantage of this approach is that it offers environment and robot real-time merging, robot performance tracking and rapid (on-the-fly) algorithms development. In this paper, the rescuing robot will follow an embedded Wall-Following algorithm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.