Map Making in Social Indoor Environment Through Robot Navigation Using Active SLAM

Robotics has come a long way from industrial robotic arms and is all set to enter our homes. The capability of a robot to navigate in an unknown human populated environment with obstacles and making map simultaneously is one of the significant characteristics in the domain of autonomous robotics. Further, the problem of robot navigating in a social environment while ensuring human safety and comfort through social norms needs to be addressed. This article presents a solution for mapping of unknown terrains with dynamic obstacles using simultaneous localization in social environments through Adaptive Squashing Function based artificial neural network training, which is able to track the target orientation angles more efficiently as compared to conventional fixed slope squashing function based backpropagation training algorithm. The performance of different state of the art techniques have been compared with proposed work through simulation models. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in complex environment where the proposed algorithm converged in less than 50% of the iterations taken by the exhaustive search algorithms and approximately 33% of the iterations taken by random search algorithm. Further, the proposed approach was tested in the real-world settings, wherein the robot was deployed to create map for the Kalpana Chawla Center for Research in Space Science and Technology, Chandigarh University with mobile humans.