The Journal of Korea Robotics Society (로봇학회논문지)

Korea Robotics Society (한국로봇학회)
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LiDAR-based Mobile Robot Exploration Considering Navigability in Indoor Environments

실내 환경에서의 주행가능성을 고려한 라이다 기반 이동 로봇 탐사 기법

  • Hyejeong Ryu (Mechatronics Engineering, Kangwon National University) ;
  • Jinwoo Choi (Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering) ;
  • Taehyeon Kim (Mechatronics Engineering, Kangwon National University)
  • Received : 2023.08.05
  • Accepted : 2023.08.30
  • Published : 2023.11.30
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Abstract

This paper presents a method for autonomous exploration of indoor environments using a 2-dimensional Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) scanner. The proposed frontier-based exploration method considers navigability from the current robot position to extracted frontier targets. An approach to constructing the point cloud grid map that accurately reflects the occupancy probability of glass obstacles is proposed, enabling identification of safe frontier grids on the safety grid map calculated from the point cloud grid map. Navigability, indicating whether the robot can successfully navigate to each frontier target, is calculated by applying the skeletonization-informed rapidly exploring random tree algorithm to the safety grid map. While conventional exploration approaches have focused on frontier detection and target position/direction decision, the proposed method discusses a safe navigation approach for the overall exploration process until the completion of mapping. Real-world experiments have been conducted to verify that the proposed method leads the robot to avoid glass obstacles and safely navigate the entire environment, constructing the point cloud map and calculating the navigability with low computing time deviation.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2022R1C1C1010931) and was supported by a grant from Endowment Projects of "Development of core technology for cooperative navigation of multiple marine robots and underwater wireless cognitive network" funded by Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean engineering under Grant PES4810

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