Navigation and Vision System of a Mobile Robot

In this paper, we describe the application and testing of reactive navigation algorithms using Nearness Diagrams on a mobile robot. The project was conducted at the German Company Innok Robotics. The addressed robot is the product of the company and is called Innok Heros. The scope of the project is an indoor application, where the robot must detect a person and follow him around while avoiding obstacles. The whole project runs under the Robot Operating System and uses the functionality provided by the C++ open source library called MRPT (Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit). As for the human detection, a Kinect sensor was used together with available ROS packages for the skeleton detection. The work was simulated using the ROS supported simulator MVSIM and was then tested on the real robot. The paper covers the theory behind the application as well as the steps followed toward the project’s goal.