Wall following using angle information measured by a single ultrasonic transducer
Teruko Yata, Lindsay Kleeman, S. Yuta · 2002
Conventional wall following with an ultrasonic sensor uses only range data to the nearest reflecting point. However, the bearing angle information to the wall is more useful for a wall following motion. In this paper, we propose a simple wall following algorithm, where the robot moves perpendicular to the direction to the nearest reflecting point. Also, in conventional ultrasonic pulse-echo sensing, an accurate target bearing measurement is often regarded as difficult due to the wide directivity of ultrasonic transducers. However, by assuming that the ultrasonic echo returns from a single direction, the bearing angle can be measured. A new sensing method is also proposed to determine accurately the bearing angle to the reflecting point by a single ultrasonic transducer. This paper also presents experimental results from mobile robot wall following experiments using only bearing information measured by a single ultrasonic transducer. These experiments illustrate the effectiveness of proposed method.