Point-to-point safe navigation of a mobile robot using stigmergy and RFID technology

Reliable autonomous navigation is still a challenging problem for robots with simple and inexpensive hardware. A key difficulty is the need to maintain an internal map of the environment and an accurate estimate of the robot's position in this map. Recently, a stigmergic approach has been proposed in which a navigation map is stored into the environment, on a grid of RFID tags, and robots use it to optimally reach predefined goal points without the need for internal maps. While effective, this approach is limited to a predefined set of goal points. In this paper, we extend this approach to enable robots to travel to any point on the RFID floor, even if it was not previously identified as a goal location, as well as to keep a safe distance from any given critical location. Our approach produces safe, repeatable and quasi-optimal trajectories without the use of internal maps, self localization, or path planning. We report experiments run in a real apartment equipped with an RFID floor, in which a service robot either reaches or avoids a user who wears slippers equipped with an RFID tag reader.