Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assi- ing, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of the new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field. The collection edited by Christian Laugier and Raja Chatila is the third one in the series on mapping and navigation, and is focused on the problem of autonomous navigation in dynamic environments. The state of the art is surveyed, a number of challenging technical aspects are discussed and upcoming technologies are addressed. The ambitious goal is to lay down the foundation for a broad class of robot m- ping and navigation methodologies for indoors, outdoors, and even exploratory m- sions. Future service robots and intelligent vehicles are waiting for effective solutions to such kind of problems.

The purpose of this book is to address the challenging problem of Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments, and to present new ideas and approaches in this newly emerging technical domain. The book surveys the state-of-the-art, discusses in detail various related challenging technical aspects, and addresses upcoming technologies in this field. The aim of the book is to establish a foundation for a broad class of mobile robot mapping and navigation methodologies for indoor, outdoor, and exploratory missions.

Three main topics located on the cutting edge of the state of the art are addressed, from both the theoretical and technological point of views: Dynamic world understanding and modelling for safe navigation, Obstacle avoidance and motion planning in dynamic environments, and Human-robot physical interactions. Several models and approaches are proposed for solving problems such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in dynamic environments, Mobile obstacle detection and tracking, World state estimation and motion prediction, Safe navigation in dynamic environments, Motion planning in dynamic environments, Robust decision making under uncertainty, and Human-Robot physical interactions.