Road following with blind crawling robot

Abstract

In this paper, we consider road following to autonomously navigate a mobile robot through an environment while keeping the robot on the specified road. Contrary to existing approaches based on a forward looking camera, we consider the problem for a technically blind walking robot without any exteroceptive sensors. The only feedback considered is an estimation of tactile information that is determined from the robot servo drives. The proposed control law is based on an on-line classification of the previously learned terrains which is utilized to identify a situation when a robot starts to crawl off the desired road terrain. The controller steers the robot to keep its body and all its legs on the road while crawling forward with a constant velocity. The experimental results support feasibility of the proposed minimalistic approach and allows the robot to autonomously navigate in an outdoor environment and follow urban park pathways and avoid off-road parts.