• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.64-73
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• 2012

In this paper, a new land preview system using laser range finder based on heave estimation algorithm is proposed. The proposed land preview system is an equipment which measures the shape of forward topography for autonomous vehicle. To implement this land preview system, the laser range finder is generally used because of its wide measuring range and robustness under various environmental condition. Then the current location of the vehicle has to be known to generate the shape of forward topography and sensors based on acceleration such as IMU and accelerometer are generally utilized to measure heave motion in the conventional land preview system. However the drawback to these sensors is that they are too expensive for low-cost vehicle such as mobile robot and their measurement error is increased for mobile robot with abrupt acceleration. In order to overcome this drawback, an algorithm that estimates heave motion using the information of odometer and previously measured topography is proposed in this paper. The proposed land preview system based on the heave estimation algorithm is verified through simulation and experiments for various terrain using a simulator and a real system.