An Adaptive Memory Model for Long-Term Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robots.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Robotics Volume 2011, Article ID 506245, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2011/506245 Research Article An Adaptive Memory Model for Long-Term Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robots M. Hentschel and B. Wagner Department of Real Time Systems, Institute for Systems Engineering, Leibniz Universitat Hannover, 30167 Hannover, Germany ¨ Correspondence should be addressed to M. Hentschel, hentschel@rts.uni-hannover.de Received 14 July 2011; Accepted 9 October 2011 Academic Editor: Jorge Manuel Dias Copyright © 2011 M. Hentschel and B. Wagner. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper introduces an environmental representation for autonomous mobile robots that continuously adapts over time. The presented approach is inspired by human memory information processing and stores the current as well as past knowledge of the environment. In this paper, the memory model is applied to time-variant information about obstacles and driveable routes in the workspace of the autonomous robot and used for solving the navigation cycle of the robot. This includes localization and path planning as well as vehicle control. The presented approach is evaluated in a real-world experiment within changing indoor environment. The results show that the environmental representation is stable, improves its quality over time, and adapts to changes. 1. Introduction In this case, it is supposed that the world can be assumed