Computing the Local Space of a Mobile Robot

Abstract

A popular approach to describing the environment of an autonomous system is to compute a representation for the space surrounding the robot, termed the local space. Recently the focus of much of the work in this area in robotics has been on acquiring a usable representation. To this end many computationally demanding algorithms have been devised in the hope that accurate representations which more closely match the real world will be computed. However this is very difficult to achieve from the robot’s initial experience of its environment. We argue that an inaccurate but useful representation can be computed from the robot’s initial view of the local space. We present an algorithm for computing this initial representation and show its implementation on a robot with sonar sensors.