Efficient navigation of mobile robot based on the robot's experience in human co-existing environment

In this paper, it is shown how a mobile robot can navigate with high speed in dynamic real environment. In order to achieve high speed and safe navigation, a robot collects environmental information. A robot empirically memorizes locations of high risk due to the abrupt appearance of dynamic obstacles. After collecting sufficient data, a robot navigates in high speed in safe regions. This fact implies that the robot accumulates location dependent environmental information and the robot exploits its experiences in order to improve its navigation performance. This paper proposes a computational scheme how a robot can distinguish regions of high risk. Then, we focus on velocity control in order to achieve high speed navigation. The proposed scheme is experimentally tested in real office building. The experimental results clearly show that the proposed scheme is useful for improving a performance of autonomous navigation. Although the scope of this paper is limited to the velocity control in order to deal with unexpected obstacles, this paper points out a new direction towards the intelligent behavior control of autonomous robots based on the robot's experience.