Multisensor-based outdoor tour guide robot NTU-I

This paper presents our development of a new outdoor tour guide robot, named, NTU-I. It is constructed to provide autonomous guiding services on the campus of National Taiwan University. In order to fulfill reliability and safety of outdoor navigation, data acquired via several sensing technologies, such as differential global positioning system (DGPS), dead reckoning, and digital compass are fused by the way of the well known extended Kalman filtering (EKF) technique. Furthermore, a shortest path planning and an obstacle avoidance algorithm are also implemented. For the latter, we deploy twelve ultrasonic sensors around the body of NTU-I to detect the nearby object within three meters. Once the robot encounters an unexpected obstacle, the proposed hierarchical navigation strategy will drive the robot to avoid collision. Experiments of both outdoor tour guide motion and on-line obstacle avoidance demonstrate the superior design of our autonomous tour guide robot NTU-I as well as its effective and plausible control scheme.