The Segway Loomo is a self-balancing segway robot, which is constantly balanced by an internal control system. A local path planning strategy was developed in advance for this robot. For local path planning, a motion model of the robot is needed to determine the effect of velocity commands on the robot’s pose. In the implemented local path planner, a simple motion model of the robot is used, which does not model the effect of the segway robot’s internal control on its motion. In this work, it was investigated whether a more accurate motion model for the Segway Loomo robot can be learned by using artificial neural networks to improve the local path planning for this robot. For this purpose, different architectures of feedforward networks were tested. The neural networks were trained and evaluated using recorded motion data of the segway robot. The best learned model was validated by using a standard differential drive motion model as a reference. For the validation of the learned model, the accuracy of both motion models was examined on the recorded motion data. On average, the learned model is 59.48 % more accurate in determining the position of the robot at the next time step and 24.61 % more accurate in determining the new orientation of the robot than the differential drive motion model.

Exploration in step-based reinforcement learning is a challenging and open problem. If it is applied in a continuous search space, the naive exploration strategy could result in an explored space which is only explored in the neighbourhood of an initial state, leaving a vast amount of entire space unexplored. Visiting states only once leads to poor performance, where the reinforcement learning algorithm gets stuck in a local minimum. This thesis presents a novel exploration scheme for continuous state-action space reinforcement learning, based on the novelty of state-action pairs, where the novelty is measured via the density of the compressed state-action pair. Furthermore, this thesis presents a method to interpolate the action to reach a smooth trajectory in a Markov Decision Process, which can be applied to any robot. The experiment was performed in the CoppeliaSim simulator on a robot with seven degrees of freedom. The results of the new approach show a more effective exploration than the baseline exploration.

The demand among the population for household robots continues to rise. These include in particular mobile cleaning and lawn mowing robots. These are usually very expensive and still very inefficient. Especially for lawn mowing robots, it is essential to have visited the entire working space in order to perform their task correctly. However, the current state of the art is still random walk algorithms, which are very unreliable and inefficient. The present bachelor thesis therefore presents a method for intelligent path planning for mobile ”low cost”robots using a lawn mower robot. The robot is only equipped with binary sensors to detect its position in its working space, which is fraught with high uncertainties. By an intelligent representation of the already visited working space as well as the path planning inspired by neural networks, the lawn mower robot manages to achieve a decisive improvement in efficiency compared to the random walk.