Autonomous navigation of RFID-sensing robots - information ensuring for the visually impaired (2)

The construction of information ensured environment for the visually impaired (say, in the college life) combining data carrier and network technologies includes the problem of obtaining and conveying environmental information. As the visually impaired have keen difficulties in sensing changes of surroundings, in order to assist them we usually need an interface (say, a guide dog) between people and the environment. We put RFID tags on surrounding objects so that we can treat them as landmarks of the environment. Then we can design autonomous robots to sense the changes of locations of objects and situations. In this paper we describe a general navigation algorithm of such robots based on distance information obtained, say, by super sonic sensors which are equipped on the robot. Our algorithm is designed on the so-called distance field space model (DFM), which can be considered as a natural description of objects and space on the basis of a fuzzy set theory. Though major part of this paper is devoted to the development of the navigation principle based on DFM, our RFID-sensing robots are not equipped with this algorithm yet.