Stigmergy at work: Planning and navigation for a service robot on an RFID floor

Many species in nature store information in the environment to facilitate the performance of tasks and enable cooperation. This principle is known as stigmergy. Stigmergy has been widely studied in robotic systems, but so far mostly in simulation or in laboratory proofs of concept. In this paper, we propose a stigmergic approach to goal-directed navigation that can be used for navigation of a full-scale robotic system in a real apartment. A team of small ePuck robots build a set of navigation maps directly onto an RFID floor, where each map is associated to one predefined goal. The information stored in the floor can then used by a mid-size robot or by a larger domestic robot to perform safe navigation toward the predefined goals. To navigate, robots only rely on the information read from the RFID tags: in particular, they do not need to use an internal map or to perform self-localization. This results in robust and repeatable navigation with minimal hardware and software requirements.