Design of an Indoor Exploration and Multi-Objective Navigation System

In this paper, we propose an indoor robot autonomous navigation system. The robot firstly explores in an unknown environment, and then navigates autonomously by using the explored map. The robot is equipped a 2D laser scanner as the main sensor. The laser scanner is used for path planning and frontier-based exploration. A 2D global occupancy map is built for path planning, frontier-based exploration and multi-objective autonomous navigation. Laser scans are transmitted into Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) process in the exploration phase. In indoor environment, the exploration efficiency is improved by merging a heuristic algorithm. By using multi-threading technology and a 3D perception approach proposed in this paper, the robot equipped with a low-cost RGBD sensor can detect all kinds of obstacles to achieve highly reliable navigation in complicated 3D environment. Meanwhile, we develop a multi-objective navigation application to make human-robot interaction more convenient and satisfy multi-task deployment. Our approaches are demonstrated by experimental results.