Development of magnetic navigation method based on distributed control system using magnetic and geometric landmarks

Background In order for a robot to autonomously run in outdoor environments, a robust and stable navigation method is necessary. Especially, to run in real-world environments, robustness against moving objects is important since many pedestrians and bicycles come and go. Magnetic field, which is not influenced by the moving objects, is considered to be an effective information for autonomous navigation. Methods Localization technique using a magnetic map, which records ambient magnetic field, has been proposed. The magnetic map is expressed as a linear map. When using this linear magnetic map, swerving from the desired path is a fatal problem. It is because that the magnetic map contains only magnetic data on a desired path. In the paper, we propose a novel navigation method which allows a robot to precisely navigate on a desired path even if localization is performed on the basis of the linear magnetic map. The navigation is performed by using a control method based on a DCS (Distributed Control System). In the system, several navigation modules are executed in parallel, and they independently control the robot by using magnetic and geometric landmarks. Results and discussion We conducted three navigation experiments. Our robot could perfectly accomplish all navigation even if it was disturbed by many moving objects during the navigation. Conclusions The control method based on the DCS could switch the navigation module for controlling the robot to cope against the change of its surroundings. The precise and robust navigation was achieved with the proposed method.