Learning navigation situations using roadmaps

The roadmap approach to robot path planning is one of the earliest methods. Since then, many different algorithms for building roadmaps have been proposed and widely implemented in mobile robots but their use has always been limited to planning in static, totally known environments. In this paper we combine the use of dynamic analogical representations of the environment with an efficient roadmap extraction method, to guide the robot navigation and to classify and learn the different navigation situation it encounters. The paper presents the general reference architecture for the robotic system and then focuses on the algorithms for the construction of the roadmap, the classification of the regions of space and their use in robot navigation. Experimental results are also discussed.