A navigation system for robots operating in crowded urban environments

Over the past years, there has been a tremendous progress in the area of robot navigation. Most of the systems developed thus far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios, non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. Urban areas introduce numerous challenges to autonomous mobile robots as they are highly complex and in addition to that dynamic. In this paper, we present a navigation system for pedestrian-like autonomous navigation with mobile robots in city environments. We describe different components including a SLAM system for dealing with huge maps of city centers, a planning approach for inferring feasible paths taking also into account the traversability and type of terrain, and a method for accurate localization in dynamic environments. The navigation system has been implemented and tested in several large-scale field tests in which the robot Obelix managed to autonomously navigate from our university campus over a 3.3 km long route to the city center of Freiburg.