A self-organizing representation of sensor space for mobile robot navigation

The paper describes a sensor based navigation scheme which makes use of a global representation of the environment by means of a self-organizing map or Kohonen network. In contrast to existing methods for self-organizing environment representation, this discrete map is not represented in the world domain or in the configuration space of the vehicle, but in the sensor domain. The map is built by exploration. A conventional path planning technique now gives a path from current state to a desired state in the sensor domain, which can be followed using sensor based control. Collisions with obstacles are detected and used in the path planning. Results from a simulation show that the learned representation gives correct paths from an arbitrary starting point to an arbitrary end point