Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation

This article describes a simple monocular navigation system for a mobile robot based on the map-and-replay technique. The presented method is robust and easy to implement and does not require sensor calibration or structured environment, and its computational complexity is independent of the environment size. The method can navigate a robot while sensing only one landmark at a time, making it more robust than other monocular approaches. The aforementioned properties of the method allow even low-cost robots to effectively act in large outdoor and indoor environments with natural landmarks only. The basic idea is to utilize a monocular vision to correct only the robot's heading, leaving distance measurements to the odometry. The heading correction itself can suppress the odometric error and prevent the overall position error from diverging. The influence of a map-based heading estimation and odometric errors on the overall position uncertainty is examined. A claim is stated that for closed polygonal trajectories, the position error of this type of navigation does not diverge. The claim is defended mathematically and experimentally. The method has been experimentally tested in a set of indoor and outdoor experiments, during which the average position errors have been lower than 0.3 m for paths more than 1 km long

Navigation without localisation: reliable teach and repeat based on the convergence theorem

We present a novel concept for teach-and-repeat visual navigation. The proposed concept is based on a mathematical model, which indicates that in teach-and-repeat navigation scenarios, mobile robots do not need to perform explicit localisation. Rather than that, a mobile robot which repeats a previously taught path can simply `replay' the learned velocities, while using its camera information only to correct its heading relative to the intended path. To support our claim, we establish a position error model of a robot, which traverses a taught path by only correcting its heading. Then, we outline a mathematical proof which shows that this position error does not diverge over time. Based on the insights from the model, we present a simple monocular teach-and-repeat navigation method. The method is computationally efficient, it does not require camera calibration, and it can learn and autonomously traverse arbitrarily-shaped paths. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the method can reliably guide mobile robots in realistic indoor and outdoor conditions, and can cope with imperfect odometry, landmark deficiency, illumination variations and naturally-occurring environment changes. Furthermore, we provide the navigation system and the datasets gathered at http://www.github.com/gestom/stroll_bearnav.Comment: The paper will be presented at IROS 2018 in Madri

Design and implementation of a real-time autonomous navigation system applied to lego robots

Teaching theoretical concepts of a real-time autonomous robot system may be a challenging task without real hardware support. The paper discusses the application of the Lego Robot for teaching multi interdisciplinary subjects to Mechatronics students. A real-time mobile robot system with perception using sensors, path planning algorithm, PID controller is used as the case to demonstrate the teaching methodology. The novelties are introduced compared to classical robotic classes: (i) the adoption of a project-based learning approach as teaching methodology; (ii) an effective real-time autonomous navigation approach for the mobile robot. However, the extendibility and applicability of the presented approach are not limited to only the educational purpose

Q Learning Behavior on Autonomous Navigation of Physical Robot

Behavior based architecture gives robot fast and reliable action. If there are many behaviors in robot, behavior coordination is needed. Subsumption architecture is behavior coordination method that give quick and robust response. Learning mechanism improve robot’s performance in handling uncertainty. Q learning is popular reinforcement learning method that has been used in robot learning because it is simple, convergent and off policy. In this paper, Q learning will be used as learning mechanism for obstacle avoidance behavior in autonomous robot navigation. Learning rate of Q learning affect robot’s performance in learning phase. As the result, Q learning algorithm is successfully implemented in a physical robot with its imperfect environment