Adaptive Mobile Robot Navigation and Mapping

The task of building a map of an unknown environment and concurrently using that map to navigate is a central problem in mobile robotics research. This paper addresses the problem of how to perform concurrent mapping and localization (CML) adaptively using sonar. Stochastic mapping is a feature-based approach to CML that generalizes the extended Kalman filter to incorporate vehicle localization and environmental mapping. The authors describe an implementation of stochastic mapping that uses a delayed nearest neighbor data association strategy to initialize new features into the map, match measurements to map features, and delete out-of-date features. The authors introduce a metric for adaptive sensing that is defined in terms of Fisher information and represents the sum of the areas of the error ellipses of the vehicle and feature estimates in the map. Predicted sensor readings and expected dead-reckoning errors are used to estimate the metric for each potential action of the robot, and the action that yields the lowest cost (i.e., the maximum information) is selected. This technique is demonstrated via simulations, in-air sonar experiments, and underwater sonar experiments. Results are shown for (1) adaptive control of motion and (2) adaptive control of motion and scanning. The vehicle tends to explore selectively different objects in the environment. The performance of this adaptive algorithm is shown to be superior to straight-line motion and random motion.