Robot Navigation and Model Development

This chapter discusses in detail about the navigation and the control model development for robot’s autonomous navigation. Before discussing the model development, let’s first discuss what navigation is? Navigation is the task of guiding a robotic vehicle/ robotic manipulator toward a desired goal in a given environment (Corke, 2017). Unlike the robotic vehicle, the human navigation task is more complex due to the following reasons, such as dealing with alternative (favorite, convenient) routes compared to planned routes, live obstacles, different environments, human safety, etc. When humans need to plan their navigation task, they have their start and end location with them and a map of the given environment. These days people have Google Maps to perform their navigation tasks. Additionally, human cognizance plays a skillful role in deciding the set of motions to reach the destination or dynamically altering the navigation strategy in case of some obstructions while reaching the destination. The robot navigation task can be quite complex because it requires lots of sensory input and highend processors to achieve the navigation task. When dealing with a lot more input information, however, with the current state of the art, the robot navigation is not at par with human navigation and cognizance level. The environment also plays a vital role in deciding the complexity of robotic navigation tasks. Since the current research is oriented towards the orchard environment, which is structured and systematic, therefore we use a mapbased navigation approach like humans to reduce the complexity of navigation tasks.