Images of the Twenty-First Century - Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Part 2

An intelligent navigation system for an autonomous mobile robot using hierarchical world map representation has been developed and implemented. This navigation system can successfully negotiate a robot's environment consisting of a network of buildings connected through common bridges. The experimental results and analysis of the implemented navigation system in a real environment are described. The developed navigation system comprises: (1) world model construction with three levels of hierarchy (building, corridor, and room); (2) two efficient techniques to plan a collision-free path to a specified goal within a known environment (in-room planning and corridor and building planning); and (3) control of the robot while executing the chosen path after abstracting the geometrical information along it from the related world model. The proposed navigation system has been demonstrated for application in a real environment that consists of a network of buildings. A real mobile robot, Yamabico.M (Level-12) that has been developed by the authors was used.