Developing a real time navigation for the mobile robots at unknown environments

Abstract

This research deals with the feasibility of a mobile robot to navigate and discover its location at unknown environments, and then constructing maps of these navigated environments for future usage. In this work, we proposed a modified Extended Kalman Filter- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKF-SLAM) technique which was implemented for different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks. Then, the detectable landmarks will play an important role in controlling the overall navigation process and EKF-SLAM technique’s performance. MATLAB simulation results of the EKF-SLAM technique come with better performance as compared with an odometry approach performance in terms of measuring the mean square error, especially when increasing the number of landmarks. After that, we simulate and evaluate a mobile robot platform named TurtleBot2e in Gazebo simulator software to achieve the using of the SLAM technique for a different environment using the Rviz library which was built on Robot Operating System in Linux. The main conclusion comes with this work is the simulation and implementation of the SLAM technique using two software platforms separately (MATLAB and ROS) in different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks so a few number of landmark will make the mobile robot loses its path.