Achieving high performance sonar-based wall-following

Abstract

In this paper we develop a technique to achieve robust high performance real-time wallfollowing behavior of a mobile robot in an indoor office environment, more specifically, in a corridor environment. The mobile robot achieves increasingly better performance by learning the environment's (most important) features in successive runs through it. This allows the robot to perform the task repeatedly, reliably, increasing the speed at which it is done after every step, without losing accuracy. We are basing our approach in the Spatial Semantic Hiearchy [Kuipers et. al. 1993].