Navigation of a sonar-equipped mobile robot with real-time local map building

This paper presents a navigation technique for a sonar-equipped mobile robot with realtime local map building in unknown environments. Since the map built in this paper represents a local region around the robot, the computation time and the memories required for map building are less than those for a global map, which is obtained after exploring over the entire environment. A navigation algorithm is constructed with the proposed local map building and reactive obstacle avoidance behaviours. In navigation experiments using a commercial mobile robot named Pioneer-1, the local map built was effective for navigation in several environments compared with a reactive navigation technique without map building, especially in complicated environments.