Sketch-based navigation for mobile robots

The goal of this work is to create a robot interface that allows a novice user to guide, control, and/or program a mobile robot to perform some task. To illustrate our interface we have chosen the example of robot navigation. We present a way to use a PDA computer to sketch a map and a robot route on this map. Qualitative instructions are then extracted from such a map to form a list of sequential steps that the robot has to follow to complete its task based on landmark states. We also demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a Nomad200 robot simulator.