Coarse Qualitative Descriptions in Robot Navigation

This work is about the integration of the skills robot control, landmark recognition, and qualitative reasoning in a single autonomous mobile system. It deals with the transfer of coarse qualitative route descriptions usually given by humans into the domain of mobile robot navigation. An approach is proposed that enables the Bremen Autonomous Wheelchair to follow a route in a building, based on a description such as “Follow this corridor, take the second corridor branching off on the right-hand side and stop at its end.” The landmark recognition uses a new method taken from the field of image processing for detecting significant places along a route.