No abstract

The Navi-Guider, which is a new tool to make it easy to handle mobile robots, is presented in this paper. Since a robot used in home should be operated easily, the proposed robot control scheme used for the Navi-Guider has to be designed to support the user-interface. The Navi-Guider that is easily mounted in a mobile robot could detect a length and a direction of the tether pulled out by a user. Those detected factors are utilized in the Navi-Guider for the robot guidance and control.

This study introduces the sonar quick mapping method using tethered-robot guiding system, Navi-guider, that is one of the human and robot interactive devices. Basic function of the Navi-guider is to actively control the robot through the tension length and an orientation of the cable. This is able to easily control the mobile robot, is applied to robot controller for quick mapping. Using Navi-guider, user can easily control the mobile robot, but the sonar sensors of the robot head occasionally make the wrong decision to return the incorrectly measured distance between the sensor and an object. Therefore, this paper presents a filtering method, called a cell conjunction filter (CCF), for building a sonar grid-based map for a mobile robot using Navi-guider. The CCF can recover the wrongly updated map by the incorrect sonar data. The principle of the CCF was based on revaluation of the occupancy possibility in a certain cell through the probabilistic relation among the cells. In this paper, the CCF was applied to a basic grid map construction model, Bayesian model, to verify its effectiveness. Experimental results were also obtained using a mobile robot in a real world environment.

A new human and robot interface tool, so-called Navi-Guider, which makes it easy to handle mobile robots, is presented in this paper. The Navi-Guider is easily mounted on a mobile robot and is able to detect a length and a direction of the tether pulled out by a user. Those detected factors are utilized for the robot guidance and control. This paper addresses detailed hardware and software architecture of the Navi-Guider and demonstrates the practical usability of the system through actual experimental tests. The new device, Navi-Guider, is an intuitive control tool for moving mobile robots from a place to another place just by pulling the tether.