Active Modular Environment for Robot Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces AFADA, an active environment with spatially deployed computing cells that manage robot navigation, offloading planning and representation from robots to environment, enabling efficient multi-robot navigation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel architecture called AFADA that decentralizes navigation planning by using interacting cells, a departure from traditional robot-centric approaches.

Findings

AFADA enables efficient single-robot navigation in dynamic environments.

The architecture supports multi-robot navigation demonstrations.

Offloading planning to environment improves navigation efficiency.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel robot-environment interaction in navigation tasks such that robots have neither a representation of their working space nor planning function, instead, an active environment takes charge of these aspects. This is realized by spatially deploying computing units, called cells, and making cells manage traffic in their respective physical region. Different from stigmegic approaches, cells interact with each other to manage environmental information and to construct instructions on how robots move. As a proof-of-concept, we present an architecture called AFADA and its prototype, consisting of modular cells and robots moving on the cells. The instructions from cells are based on a distributed routing algorithm and a reservation protocol. We demonstrate that AFADA achieves efficient robot moves for single-robot navigation in a dynamic environment changing its topology with a stochastic model, comparing to self-navigation by a robot itself. This is followed by several demos, including multi-robot navigation, highlighting the power of offloading both representation and planning from robots to the environment. We expect that the concept of AFADA contributes to developing the infrastructure for multiple robots because it can engage online and lifelong planning and execution.