An intelligent navigation method for service robots in the smart environment

Autonomous navigation is one of primitive functionalities which service robots should have; nevertheless, the navigation problem for a service robot still has many difficulties because the real environment where service robots should works is so complex and dynamical. This paper proposes a framework of intelligent navigation for service robots based on a semantic map of the smart environment. In the smart environment, the robot can receive his position information from location sensors by sensor networks, and it can eliminate the accumulated localization errors. So the robot can accomplish confidential localization in the dynamic and complex environment. With the topological information in the semantic map, path planning problem can be simple even in the wide and complex spaces, and topological path from semantic map can be divided into several sub goals. Robust navigation can be accomplished by moving towards these sub goals with reactive navigation algorithm which has robust characteristics in the dynamic environments. Our approaches have ascertained the good performance on the localization and the navigation, and the feasibility of these methods could be confirmed with the result of experiments in the real environment.