Functionally classified framework based navigation system for indoor service Robots

This paper proposes a new integrated navigation system for a mobile robot in indoor environments. This system consists of five frameworks which are classified by function. This architecture can make the navigation system scalable and flexible. The robot can recover from exceptional situations, such as environmental changes, failure of entering the narrow path, and path occupation by moving objects, using the exception recovery framework. The environmental change can be dealt with using the probabilistic approach, and the problems with the narrow path and path occupation are solved using the ray casting algorithm and the Bayesian update rule. The proposed navigation system was successfully applied to several robots and operated in various environments. Experimental results showed good performance in that the exception recovery framework significantly increased the success rate of navigation. The system architecture proposed in this paper can reduce the time for developing robot applications through its reusability and changeability.