Map-Building

"Giulio Cesare" has been provided with a 3 zone based navigation control system, as shown below. Robot main behaviour is boundary-following, on which higher level activities (map-building and self-positioning) have been structured.

This is the ground floor plant of our Department where Giulio Cesare's activities take place.

The picture below compares two kind of symbolic maps representing the world-space as a list of detectable landmarks (walls and doors). The first one, built by local geometric information, has been preferred because of it is connected, whereas the second, built by global odometric data, is not connected due to incremental odometry errors.

Doors in the Department are characterized as shown below; the background is dark and a metallic grid is placed where the infrared sensors operate.

On the left is reported the ultrasound perception of the robot meeting a door on a wall-following trajectory. On the right there is the correspondent infrared one. By fusing this two sensor perceptions "Giulio Cesare" is able to recognize a door and put an istance of that landmark in its incremental topologic map.