Vehicle Autonomous Navigation with Context Awareness

Nowadays, many models performing global robotic navigation exist, and they are capable to reach their set destination safely and autonomously. However, most of them don’t take into account the information coming from the context in which such navigation is occurring, resulting in a severe information loss. Without context-aware navigation, it is not possible to build a model to let the vehicle adapt its behaviour to the situation, in the way a human driver spontaneously does. It is therefore needed a study on how to connect the contextual information with the robot’s control loop. For our solution we built an ontology-based structure that helps the vehicle reason in real-time and change its own behaviour in function of given contextual information. After the definition of the Context of Navigation, in this paper we propose an approach to the problem of encoding the Context Awareness in the Autonomous Navigation’s controller. Finally, such approach is put to the test in a simulator, to discuss the results achieved.