Fakultät für Informatik
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When animals (including humans) first explore a new environment, what they remember is fragmentary knowledge about the places visited. Yet, they have to use such fragmentary knowledge to find their way home.
Humans naturally use more powerful heuristics while lower animals have shown to develop a variety of methods that tend to utilize two key pieces of information, namely distance and orientation information.
Their methods differ depending on how they sense their environment. Could a mobile robot be used to investigate the nature of such a process, commonly referred to in the psychological literature as cognitive mapping? What might be computed in the initial explorations and how is the resulting “cognitive map” be used for localization?
In this paper, we present an approach using a mobile robot to generate a “cognitive map”, the main focus being on experiments conducted in large spaces that the robot cannot apprehend at once due to the very limited range of its sensors. The robot computes a “cognitive map” and uses distance and orientation information for localization.
We present an approach for indoor mapping and localisation using sparse range data, acquired by a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors.
The chapter consists of two main parts. First, a split and merge based method for dividing a given metric map into distinct regions is presented, thus creating a topological map in a metric framework. Spatial information extracted from this map is then used for self-localisation on the return home journey.
The robot computes local confidence maps for two simple localisation strategies based on distance and relative orientation of regions. These local maps are then fused to produce overall confidence maps.
When animals (including humans) first explore a new environment, what they remember is fragmentary knowledge about the places visited. Yet, they have to use such fragmentary knowledge to find their way home. Humans naturally use more powerful heuristics while lower animals have shown to developa varietyof methodsthat tend to utilize two key pieces of information,namely distance and orientation information.
Their methods differ depending on how they sense their environment.
Could a mobile robot be used to investigate the nature of such a process, commonly referred to in the psychological literature as cognitive mapping? What might be computed in the initial explorations and how is the resulting “cognitive map” be used to return home?
In this paper, we presented a novel approach using a mobile robot to do cognitive mapping. Our robot computes a “cognitive map” and uses distance and orientation information to find its way home.
The process developed provides interesting insights into the nature of cognitive mapping and encourages us to use a mobile robot to do cognitive mapping in the future, as opposed to its popular use in robot mapping.