An advanced planning and navigation approach for autonomous cleaning robot operations

This paper presents an information processing scheme which increases the autonomy of floor caring robots in indoor applications, such as cleaning or inspection of industrial and public floor areas. An automatic planner generates a serpentine path pattern by repeated and appropriate concatenation of up to five basic motion macros. This nominal path is executed by a Cartesian motion controller. In case of unexpected obstacles the robot updates its internal geometric representation of the work area to be processed and replans its path. Due to obstacle avoidance, certain areas may remain unprocessed. Location and topology of such areas are automatically reconstructed for repeated follow-up floor caring in case of temporary obstacles. For this purpose connecting maneuvres and paths of complete floor coverage are incrementally planned and executed. Landmark localization at automatically preplanned reference points allows online modification of motion commands and guarantees precise long distance path tracking. Feasibility of the developed techniques has been demonstrated in various long-term experiments with the prototype mobile service robot MACROBE.