Tracking Control for Reliable Outdoor Navigation Using Curb Detection

In the past several years there has been increasing interest in applications of a mobile robot. Personal service robots perform the missions of guiding tourists in museum, cleaning room and nursing the elderly [1]. Mobile robots have been used for the purpose of patrol, reconnaissance, surveillance and exploring planets, etc [2]. The indoor environment has a variety of features such as walls, doors and furniture that can be used for mapping and navigation of a mobile robot. In contrast to the indoor cases, it is hard to find any specific features in outdoor environment without some artificial landmarks [3]. Fortunately, the existence of curbs on roadways is very useful to build a map and localization in outdoor environment. The detected curb information could be used for not only map building and localization but also navigating safely [4]. And also the mobile robot decides to go or stop using the width of the road calculated from the detected curb. The present paper deals with the development of a robot which can patrol areas such as industrial complexes and research centers. We have already reported about outdoor navigation of a mobile robot [5]. The extended Kalman filter is applied for the fusion between odometry and Differential Global Positioning System(DGPS) measurement data. It is insufficient for reliable navigation since the error of DGPS measurement data increased near high buildings and trees [6]. Hence, it is necessary to correct the pose of a mobile robot when the position data from the odometry and DGPS are inaccurate. This chapter proposes the curb detection algorithm and calculate the pose error from the curb edge data and then use it to correct the pose of the mobile robot.