A development of map building sensor system for mobile robot using low cost photo sensor

Mobile robot has various sensors for describing the external world. The ultrasonic sensor widely applied to the most mobile robot to detect the obstacle and environment owing to low cost, its easy to use. However, ultrasonic sensor has major problems: the uncertainty information of sensor, false readings caused by specular reflection, multi path effect, low angular resolution and sensitivity to changes in temperature and humidity. This paper describes a sensor system for map building of mobile robot. It was made of low cost PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) sensor array and high speed RISC MPU. PSD sensor is cost effective and light weighting but its output signal has many noises. We propose heuristic S/W filter to effectively remove these noises. The developed map building sensor system was equipped on a mobile robot and was compared with ultrasonic sensor through field test.