Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping to Reach Linguistically-Defined Targets.

This paper introduces a framework that allows humans to give highly abstract navigation instructions to mobile robots. It uses simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) to navigate a mobile robot through an unknown environment and combines it with a structured, pseudo-human language for describing the navigation instructions. This combination allows for the design of mobile robot navigation systems that may use any SLAM algorithm and any language that satisfies certain requirements. The described framework delineates the requirements that the SLAM system and the language must meet for this combination to work. It operates on the basis of having a robot carry out a task other than to create a map, resulting in the robot being able to start moving towards its target before even mapping the environment. The core innovation is the definition of a method for driving robot movement in a way that balances between reducing map uncertainty and reaching the requested target. Our method generalises the state-of-art in that it falls back to the conventional explore-then-navigate paths in the absence of a specific target, but focuses on following the navigation instructions when such are provided.