a Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
b Department of Computer and Information Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ 07078, USA
Abstract:
This paper describes a method for absolute localization and environment recognition for an autonomous, sonar-equipped robot. The addition of an auto-associative memory to previously developed non-neural map making software results in a system that is capable of recognizing its environment and its position within the environment using remembered features and room geometry. In the prior system the robot used sonar to construct a metric map of an environment, but the map information had to be reconstructed each time the robot returned to an environment. We evaluated the system with a task that requires memory of the position of a goal that is not directly detectable by sonar.