Research on Navigation of Smart Robots in Gerocomium Based on DWA

The elderly moving slowly in the gerocomium and the staff going back and forth to the pharmacy will all become obstacles in the navigation path of the intelligent robot in the gerocomium. In scenarios with significant changes in lighting intensity, the robot may encounter problems such as path positioning loss and incorrect path planning. Facing the above challenges, this paper proposes two innovative ideas to optimize the DWA algorithm: (1) For the first time, it is proposed to combine the face detection based on YOLOv8 with DWA, and a new face attraction term is added. A radius threshold is set around the face. If the distance between the robot and the face is less than this value, an obstacle avoidance penalty term will be increased. (2) Dynamically adjust the cost function of DWA, and optimize the smoothness and safety of the DWA navigation path by combining the newly added face attraction term and the safety distance constraint. Adaptive weight allocation is introduced into the improved DWA to balance the safe distance between the robot and the elderly when they are close, the timeliness of the robot avoiding the slowly moving elderly, and the smoothness of the robot's navigation path. Finally, the environment of the gerocomium is simulated in a laboratory environment for experimental testing. The results show that, compared with the traditional DWA, the navigation success rate of the optimized DWA is increased by 21.5% (from 70.5% to 93.5%), the minimum safety distance is increased by 53.7% (from 0.37m to 0.72m), and the smoothness of the navigation path is increased by 71%. This method provides a more secure, efficient and powerful guarantee for the navigation of robots in gerocomiums.