• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.217-224
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• 2001

In this paper, the relocation of a mobile robot is considered such that it enables the robot to determine its position with respect to a global reference frame without any $\alpha$ priori position information. The robot acquires sonar range data from a two-dimensional model composed of planes, corners, edges, and cylinders. Considering individual range as data features, the robot searches the best position where the data features of a position matches the environmental model using a constraint-based search method. To increase the search efficiency, a hypothesize and-verify technique is employed in which the position of the robot is calculated from all possible combinations of two range returns that satisfy the sonar sensing model. Accurate relocation is demonstrated with the results from sets of experiments using sparse sonar data in the presence of unmodeled objects.