Direction-driven navigation using cognitive map for mobile robots

Building an integrated mobile robot that can navigate freely and deliberately in an indoor environment is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a direction-driven navigation system, in which a mobile robot is instructed to follow the given directions instead of a global path. This is similar to humans when travelling to a target destination by following the directional guidance from someone else. This system consists of two main modules including a grid-based direction planner and a multilayered asymmetrical local navigation module. The directions of movement are computed from a brain-inspired spatial cognitive map using the grid-based direction planner, while the motion of the robot is controlled by the local navigation module. In order to improve the mapping performance using RGB-D input, an improved template comparison method is suggested. The proposed system is implemented in a mobile robot that performs simultaneous localization, mapping, and navigation in a typical office environment. The experimental results indicate that the robot can efficiently navigate to target destinations.