An Effective Trace-Guided Wave-front Navigation and Map Building Approach for Autonomous Mobile Robots

This paper aims to address a trace- guided real-time navigation and map building approach of an autonomous mobile robot. Wave-front based global path planner is developed to generate a global trajectory for an autonomous mobile robot. Modified Vector Field Histogram (M-VFH) is employed based on the LIDAR sensor information to guide the robot locally to be autonomously traversed with obstacle avoidance by following traces provided by the global path planner. A local map composed of square grids is created through the local navigator while the robot traverses with limited LIDAR sensory information. From the measured sensory information, a map of the robot's immediate limited surroundings is dynamically built for the robot navigation. The real-time wave-front based navigation and map building methodology has been successfully demonstrated in a Player/Stage simulation environment. With the wave-front-based global path planner and M-VFH local navigator, a safe, short, and reasonable trajectory is successfully planned in a majority of situations without any templates, without explicitly optimizing any global cost functions, and without any learning procedures. Its effectiveness, feasibility, efficiency and simplicity of the proposed real-time navigation and map building of an autonomous mobile robot have been successfully validated by simulation and comparison studies. Comparison studies of the proposed approach with the other path planning approaches demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of planning more reasonable and shorter collision-free trajectories autonomously.