Development of a sonar map based position estimation system for an autonomous mobile robot operating in an unknown environment

미지의 영역에서 활동하는 자율이동로봇의 초음파지도에 근거한 위치인식 시스템 개발

Among the prerequisite abilities (perception of environment, path planning and position estimation) of an autonomous mobile robot, position estimation has been seldom studied by mobile robot researchers. In most cases, conventional positioin estimation has been performed by placing landmarks or giving the entrire environmental information in advance. Unlikely to the conventional ones, the study addresses a new method that the robot itself can select distinctive features in the environment and save them as landmarks without any a priori knowledge, which can maximize the autonomous behavior of the robot. First, an orjentaion probaility model is applied to construct a lcoal map of robot's surrounding. The feature of the object in the map is then extracted and the map is saved as landmark. Also, presented is the position estimation method that utilizes the correspondence between landmarks and current local map. In dong this, the uncertainty of the robot's current positioin is estimated in order to select the corresponding landmark stored in the previous steps. The usefulness of all these approaches are illustrated with the results porduced by a real robot equipped with ultrasonic sensors.