The Autonomous City Explorer project

This video presents the Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project. Its goal was to create a robot capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. The robot had to find its way solely by interacting with pedestrians and building a topological representation of its surroundings. This video outlines the necessary ingredients for successful low-level navigation on sidewalks, information retrieval from pedestrians as well as the construction of a semantic representation of an urban environment. A system architecture for outdoor localization, traversability assessment, path planning, behavior selection and topological abstraction in urban environments is presented.

Authors

• Andrea Maria Bauer
• Klaas Klasing
• Tingting Xu
• Stefan Sosnowski
• Georgios Lidoris
• Quirin Mühlbauer
• Tianguang Zhang
• Florian Rohrmüller
• Dirk Wollherr
• Kolja Kühnlenz
• Martin Buss

Keywords

• Cities and towns
• Navigation
• Mobile robots
• Human robot interaction
• Robotics and automation
• Global Positioning System
• Information retrieval
• Robot vision systems
• Videoconference
• Buildings
• Urban Environments
• Pedestrian
• Path Planning
• Successful Navigation
• Mobile Platform
• Human-robot Interaction
• Laser Ranging
• Occupancy Grid
• Route Knowledge