Sensor Fusion based Obstacle Avoidance for Terrain-Adaptive Mobile Robot
Gyung-Hwan Yuk, Hyunseok Yang, Noh-Chul Park, Sangwon Lee · Journal of Control Automation and Systems Engineering · 2007
The mobile robots to rescue a life in a disaster area and to explore planets demand high mobility as well as recognition of the environment. To avoid unknown obstacles exactly in unknown environment, accurate sensing is required. This paper proposes a sensor fusion to recognize unknown obstacles accurately by using low-cost sensors. Ultrasonic sensors and infrared sensors are used in this paper to avoid obstacles. If only one of these sensors is used alone, it is not useful fer the mobile robots to complete their tasks in the real world since the surrounding environment in the real world is complex and composed of many kinds of materials. So infrared sensor may not recognize transparent or reflective obstacles and ultrasonic sensor may not recognize narrow obstacles, far example, columns of small diameter. Therefore, I selected six ultrasonic sensors and five infrared sensors to detect obstacles. Then, I fused ultrasonic sensors with infrared sensors in order that both advantages and disadvantages of each sensor are utilized together. In fusing sensors, fuzzy algorithm is used to cope with the uncertainties of each sensor. TAMRY which is terrain-adaptive mobile robot is used as the mobile robot for experiments.