A Software Framework for Autonomous Navigation of Robots in Unknown Environment

What is it about?

Autonomously navigating a robot in an unknown scene comprises tasks such as mapping and localization from the percepts via sensors, safe motion-planning under partial knowledge of the scene, and finally, plan execution using the available motion primitives of the robot. Though many software systems are available for these sub-tasks, there is a lack of integrated software that supports autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present an integrated software framework comprising of simultaneous localization and mapping module using visual odometry, a motion-planning module based on constraint-solving, and a plan-execution module particularly designed for a lizard-inspired quadruped robot.

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Why is it important?

Autonomous navigation is of central importance in robotics, with the increasing use of robots in various applications such as search and rescue operations [7], warehouse automation [2], surveillance [12], etc. Many of these applications require planning and control in unknown environments. Autonomously navigating a robot in an unknown scene comprises tasks such as mapping and localization from the percepts received via sensors, safe motion-planning under partial knowledge of the scene, and finally, plan execution utilizing the available motion primitives of the robot. Though many software systems support these sub-tasks, there is a lack of integrated software that supports all the sub-tasks for autonomous navigation.