Feature Based Map Building Method Using Sonar Data

The paper presents a sonar based map building method. The environment is a room or area inside a building, which is composed of four types of geometric primitives(corners, edges, cylinders, and walls). We also assume the environment can be modeled into two dimensional map in terms of planes(walls), points(corner and edge), and circle(cylinder). In a real world where most of the object surfaces are specular ones, a sonar sensor suffers from a multipath effect which results in a wrong interpretation of the location of an object. To reduce the effect and uncertainty, the method employs a simple thresholding technique for extracting circular arc features called regions of constant depth(RCD) from scanning sonar data. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated with the results produced by sets of experiments.