Speed Maps: An Application to Guide Robots in Human Environments
This work addresses safety and efficiency for mobile robots operating around humans, but it is incremental as it builds on existing navigation and mapping techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of mobile robot navigation in human environments by introducing speed maps, which set speed limits to improve safety and efficiency. They demonstrated that speed maps can reduce both potential collision impact and navigation time.
We present the concept of speed maps: speed limits for mobile robots in human environments. Static speed maps allow for faster navigation on corridors while limiting the speed around corners and in rooms. Dynamic speed maps put limits on speed around humans. We demonstrate the concept for a mobile robot that guides people to annotated landmarks on the map. The robot keeps a metric map for navigation and a semantic map to hold planar surfaces for tasking. The system supports automatic initialization upon the detection of a specially designed QR code. We show that speed maps not only can reduce the impact of a potential collision but can also reduce navigation time.