Shared Floor Plan Alignment for Multi-Robot Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing autonomous robots face challenges in navigating complex environments safely and accurately due to insufficient high-quality sensors, leading to difficulties in creating maps that align with user expectations and maintaining accurate floor plans.
Innovation Solution
A floor plan system that generates, updates, and repairs maps using occupancy data from autonomous mobile devices, incorporating user inputs and heuristics to segment rooms and maintain a consistent floor plan across multiple devices, without requiring additional data-rich sources.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If consumer-grade robots are equipped with more high-quality sensors to navigate safely in complex environments, then navigation safety and map accuracy improve, but device complexity and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the mapping function into multiple components: occupancy grid generation from sensor data, floor plan extraction algorithms, and heuristic-based room segmentation. This allows each component to be optimized independently and enables the use of simpler sensors combined with sophisticated software processing to achieve reliable navigation and accurate mapping without requiring expensive high-quality sensors
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary processing layer (the floor plan system) that translates raw sensor data into structured floor plan representations. This intermediary system uses occupancy grids as an intermediate representation and applies heuristic algorithms to extract meaningful floor plan information, enabling reliable navigation safety through software-based compensation for sensor limitations
2Adaptability or versatility
If multiple autonomous devices operate in a shared environment with different coordinate systems, then device versatility and coverage improve, but maintaining geometric consistency and alignment across devices becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a universal floor plan coordinate system that serves all autonomous devices regardless of their individual coordinate systems. The floor plan system acts as a universal reference frame that can accommodate data from multiple devices with different coordinate systems, enabling multi-device operation while maintaining geometric consistency through centralized coordinate transformation and alignment algorithms
Solution Approach 2:
The system employs feedback mechanisms where the floor plan system receives occupancy data from multiple devices, processes it through alignment algorithms, and generates corrected floor plan representations that maintain geometric consistency. The system continuously refines the shared floor plan by incorporating feedback from multiple devices and applying transformations to ensure all devices operate from a geometrically consistent reference frame
3Measurement precision
If floor plans are updated frequently to reflect environment changes, then map accuracy and user alignment improve, but processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of completely reprocessing the entire floor plan with each update, the system applies partial updates by processing only the changed regions. The occupancy grid system allows for incremental updates where only affected areas are reprocessed, and the floor plan extraction is applied selectively to maintain accuracy without the computational overhead of full reprocessing
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary processing by maintaining occupancy grids that are continuously updated in the background. When floor plan updates are needed, the preliminary occupancy data is already prepared and structured, allowing for faster extraction and updating of floor plans without requiring time-consuming raw data processing at the moment of update
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and techniques for generation, storage, and updating of common floor plans across shared autonomous mobile devices. The systems and techniques include a central server having a floor plan stored thereon. The floor plan is updated by receiving an updated floor plan or updated data from one or more of the autonomous mobile devices. The floor plan is updated and subsequently propagated across all the autonomous mobile devices in the environment to ensure consistency and accuracy of floor plans.