Adaptive Robot Speed Control by Considering Map and Localization Uncertainty

This paper describes an adaptive robot speed control method for safe and efficient navigation in unknown environments. Speed control is important in the following two cases. (1) When a robot enters a narrow free space, it needs to control the speed to avoid any collision considering the motion uncertainty. (2) When a robot enters a region whose vacancy (i.e., being free) has not been decided yet, it needs to control the speed so that it can observe the region sufficiently to be confident with the vacancy of the region. This paper proposes a simple but effective strategy for speed control that the robot selects the fastest safe speed. To adopt this strategy, we define criteria for judging whether a speed is safe for the above two cases. The proposed method successfully made the robot move around in unknown static environments with adaptively controlling the speed.