Richárd Szabó
Mobile robotics and robot navigation is a growing area of scientific research. Robot simulators are useful designing and analizing tools of this domain.
Webots [?] is a well-known representant of these programs, a three-dimensional mobile robot simulator. Various guidance principles can be developed in C/C++ or Java programming language with the use of Webots controller programs.
In this paper a short overview is given about the problems arising in the process of the navigation, and a short taxonomy is presented about the possible problem solving methods [?]. A brief introduction to the probabilistic navigation techniques concerning Kalman filter and expectation maximization is included with a special focus on occupancy grid.
Formerly I presented a metric navigation method based on occupancy grid working in the Webots simulation environment [?]. As a continuation of that research I created an enhancement of the former processes, a hybrid metric-topological navigation mechanism. A topologic layer is introduced in the environment exploration phase replacing the older value iteration [?]. The implementation of a topologic graph of the explorable places using the metric map enables the robot to navigate in a more efficient manner. A comparison of the pure metric and the new hybrid methods is also given.
Department of Software Technology and Methodology, Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University, 1117, Pázmány P. s. 1/D. Budapest, Hungary. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Eötvös Loránd University, 1117, Pázmány P. s. 1. Budapest, Hungary.