Navigation of a sonar-equipped mobile robot with real-time local map building

This paper presents a navigation technique for a sonar-equipped mobile robo t with realtime local map building in unknown environments. Since the map b uilt in this paper represents a local region around the robot, the computat ion time and the memories required for map building are less than those for a global map, which is obtained after exploring over the entire environmen t. A navigation algorithm is constructed with the proposed local map buildi ng and reactive obstacle avoidance behaviours. In navigation experiments us ing a commercial mobile robot named Pioneer-1, the local map built was effe ctive for navigation in several environments compared with a reactive navig ation technique without map building, especially in complicated environment s.