Autonomous Indoor Navigation Robot

摘要

Autonomous robots are intelligent machines capable of performing tasks by themselves without human control. In this work, an autonomous robot that can navigate an indoor restaurant setting and assume the role of an automated customer servicing system is proposed. The robot has to be aware of its own position in the workspace and compute the shortest path to the customer when introduced in a known environment. The RRT path planning algorithm is optimized using goal biasing and vector field RRT is built upon it to reduce the total number of computations required, eventually reducing the latency. We closely model a real time restaurant environment where multiple customers request for service simultaneously or at random instants of time. The servicing robot has to prioritize requests based on different parameters such as distance-to-goal, number of obstacles in the path, frequency of calls made by the customer and other special concession for customers based on their age etc. and appropriately service the table with highest priority. The performance analysis of the proposed algorithm is compared with RRT based routing and it is observed that there is significant reduction in servicing time when the proposed model is implemented.