Automated Generation of Site Map Graphs for Robot-Inclusive Tactile Marker Placement

Navigation is a primary requirement for mobile robots as they encounter hazards during operation. To improve safety for robotic deployments, hazard alert systems could be integrated into their spatial environments to reduce robotic computational load and hardware requirements, while providing benefits to visually-impaired human users in the area. Modified tactile paving markers known as the Passive Auto-Tactile Heuristic (PATH) tiles are configured for robotic usage to aid in their navigation and hazard avoidance along with a specialized Tactile Sensor Module, while providing tactile cues to visually-impaired human users. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for generating standardized layouts of ‘safe routes’ from site plans of the robot’s workspace as input. The creation of ‘safe routes’ is implemented by extracting site boundaries and outlines of interior obstacles of an input site plan, generating of the site’s Medial Axis (MA) through its connectivity graph and overlaying the corresponding PATH tile types. This implementation is explored using the Rhinoceros3D CAD program, Grasshopper development platform and associated plugins for processing the site plan and visualization of the eventual routes. The algorithm is tested on 5 sites of varying spatial functions for validation.