Autonomous robot navigation in outdoor cluttered pedestrian walkways

  • Authors:

  • Yoichi Morales;Alexander Carballo;Eijiro Takeuchi;Atsushi Aburadani;Takashi Tsubouchi

  • Affiliations:

  • Intelligent Robot Laboratory Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan;Intelligent Robot Laboratory Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan;Intelligent Robot Laboratory Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan;Intelligent Robot Laboratory Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan;Intelligent Robot Laboratory Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Field Robotics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper describes an implementation of a mobile robot system for autonomous navigation in outdoor concurred walkways. The task was to navigate through nonmodified pedestrian paths with people and bicycles passing by. The robot has multiple redundant sensors, which include wheel encoders, an inertial measurement unit, a differential global positioning system, and four laser scanner sensors. All the computation was done on a single laptop computer. A previously constructed map containing waypoints and landmarks for position correction is given to the robot. The robot system's perception, road extraction, and motion planning are detailed. The system was used and tested in a 1-km autonomous robot navigation challenge held in the City of Tsukuba, Japan, named “Tsukuba Challenge 2007.” The proposed approach proved to be robust for outdoor navigation in cluttered and crowded walkways, first on campus paths and then running the challenge course multiple times between trials and the challenge final. The paper reports experimental results and overall performance of the system. Finally the lessons learned are discussed. The main contribution of this work is the report of a system integration approach for autonomous outdoor navigation and its evaluation. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.