Development of an autonomous outdoor patrol robot in private road environment

Recently, the necessity of an autonomous outdoor patrol robot is increasing. The outdoor navigation is more difficult than an indoor navigation because the outdoor environment is more complex than the indoor environment. Various methods[1-2] for the outdoor navigation were researched. However, it is not easy to implement these methods[1-2], since these solutions require expensive sensors. In this paper, we compute the robot's pose by using Extended Kalman Filter[3], and extract the road information by using single Laser Range Finder (LRF). The localization, motion control, and the road information are used for a stable navigation. By using the proposed method, the autonomous outdoor patrol robot can navigate successfully in regular road environments.