New approach to robot guidance in an unfamiliar environment using indication-post

A novel approach to robot guidance in an unfamiliar environment is presented. In previous guiding methods, a preinstalled map or predefined path is required for a robot navigating in its working space. The present method uses an indication post (IP) to provide the information on the destination, the direction, and the distance from the source point to the destination point, assuming that the mobile robot has no information concerning its workplace. To realize the concept, many IPs depicting simple information were designed. The content of IPs can be described by using a finite-state grammar. Image-processing, statistical, and syntactic pattern-recognition approaches are integrated to solve the problems of IP finding, robot location determination, IP identification, and understanding. Experiments simulating practical environments were performed. The results verify that the IP candidates can be automatically found and the depicted information can be extracted and understood correctly, so that the mobile robot is able to plan a global optimal path from an arbitrary start point to an arbitrary end point.