A mobile robot sonar system
Solomon Rand Sherfey · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1991
In order to function autonomously in the real world a mobile robot must first be able to sense the boundaries of it's operating space. Once the enclosing features and/or obstacles have been sensed they must be interpreted and represented in some way meaningful to the robot's controlling algorithms. The objective of this work is the development of a system of ultrasonic sensors, or sonars, for the mobile robot YAMABICO-11 at the Naval Postgraduate School, and the implementation of a user friendly set of sonar language functions for the robot's control language MML. The sonar hardware includes twelve transducer pairs, their drivers and a bus mounted control card. The sonar control system operates autonomously under direction of the robot's central processor.Extraction of linear features is accomplished by the use of a least-square-fit algorithm of cartesian coordinate pairs to a parametric representation of the including line segment.