Rapid Development of a Mobile Robot for the Nakanoshima Challenge Using a Robot for Intelligent Environments

Automated mobile platforms are commonly used to provide services for people in an intelligent environment. Data on the physical position of personal electronic devices or mobile robots are important for information services and robotic applications. Therefore, automated mobile robots are required to reconstruct location data in surveillance tasks. This paper describes the development of an autonomous mobile robot to achieve tasks in intelligent environments. In particular, the robot constructed route maps in outdoor environments using laser imaging detection and ranging (LiDAR), and RGB-D sensors via simultaneous localization and mapping. The mobile robot system was developed based on a robot operating system (ROS), reusing existing software. The robot participated in the Nakanoshima Challenge, which is an experimental demonstration test of mobile robots in Osaka, Japan. The results of the experiments and outdoor field tests demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed robot system.