Shared-Autonomy Navigation for Mobile Robots Driven by a Door Detection Module

Shared-autonomy approaches are the most appealing for what concerns the control of assistive devices such as wheelchairs and mobile robots, designed to aid disabled and elderly people. In this paper, we propose a shared-autonomy navigation for mobile robots, that combines the user’s interaction as well as the robots’ perception and the environment knowledge, with the information of important landmarks, namely the doors. In order to facilitate the control of the robot, our system exploits a door detection module, aiming to detect doors and especially to identify their open/close status, making the robot pass through narrow doorways without any user’s intervention. We tested the proposed system on a real mobile robot to verify the feasibility.