Learning Spatial Constraints using Gaussian Process for Shared Control
of Semi-autonomous Mobile Robots
Kun Qian
1,2
, Dan Niu
1,2
, Fang Fang
1,2
and Xudong Ma
1,2
1
Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of CSE, Ministry of Education, No.2, Sipailou, Nanjing 210096, China
2
School of Automation, Southeast University, No.2, Sipailou, Nanjing 210096, China
Keywords:
Mobile Robot, Gaussian Process, Shared control, Semi-autonomous, Wi-Fi Signal Strength.
Abstract:
In this paper, a novel human-robot shared control approach is proposed to solve the problem of semi-
autonomous mobile robot navigation with the spatial constraints of maintaining reliable Wi-Fi connection.
In particular, the presented approach benefits from using Gaussian Process Regression method to learn the
distribution of indoor Wi-Fi signal strength (WSS) and to fuse it with the environmental occupancy probabil-
ity. The resulting WSS-Occupancy hybrid map is further utilized for generating paths that prevent the robot
from violating the spatial restriction. A shared control strategy is designed to implement the WSS-aware nav-
igation behaviour. The approach is evaluated by both simulation and real-world experiments, in which the
results validate the practicability and effectiveness of the approach.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the increasing prevalence of wireless LAN
in indoor environments, tele-operated mobile robots
have been applied to environment inspection and
monitoring applications(Sgouros and Gerogiannakis,
2003)(Pitzer et al., 2012). In situations that spatial
constraints other than obstacles are imposed to such
a networked mobile robot, full tele-operation may not
be reliable enough and semi-autonomous robots(Tang
et al., 2009) with human-robot collaboration have be-
come important in network robotic system.
In the context of this study, the focus is particu-
larly on an unknown spatial constraint of maintain-
ing reliable Wi-Fi connections during robot naviga-
tion. Our motivation originates from the fact that in
indoor environments, when a robot navigates through
an area with poor Wi-Fi signal strength (WSS), the
tele-operation system may temporarily lose control
over the robot, neither can continuous and high qual-
ity tele-presence (visual and audio) feedback be en-
sured.
By treating the Wi-Fi distributionas a static spatial
constraint here, the solution is to design a WSS-aware
navigation behavior for ensuring continuous and reli-
able Wi-Fi connection during the robots exploration.
We define the problem mentioned above as spatially
restricted navigation of a tele-operated mobile robot.
Intuitively, learning the distribution of spatial con-
straints in the environment can be benefit to prevent
a robot from violating the restriction. Learning the
spatial distribution of an indoor environment from a
mobile platform can be formulated as a well-known
regression problem, i.e., to predict sensor values at
locations where the robot doesn’t traverse. Gaussian
Process(Rasmussen and Williams, 2006)(Qian et al.,
2016) is a powerful formalism for predict the prob-
ability distributions over sensor values at uncovered
locations. In Jadaliha’s work(Jadaliha et al., 2012),
the authors employed Gaussian Processes (GPs) to
build non-parametric probabilistic models using data
from a pilot sensor work deployment, for monitoring
spatial phenomena of interest. In order to handle the
diffusion and patches effects of complex interaction
of gas, Stachniss(Stachniss et al., 2009) proposes to
learn two-dimensional spatial models of gas distribu-
tions using a sparse Gaussian process mixture model,
which accurately represents the smooth background
signal and the areas with patches of high concentra-
tions. These recent studies(Krause et al., 2008)(Fer-
ris and D. Hahnel, 2006)(Xu et al., 2011)(Xu and
Choi, 2011)(Engel et al., 2003)(Ko et al., 2007) have
shown that Gaussian processes are an attractive mod-
eling technique in this context since they do not only
provide an estimate of sensory data for each point in
the space but also the predictive uncertainty. To our
best knowledge, the GPs approach has not yet been
applied to model the indoor Wi-Fi signal strength dis-