Multisonar-Based Autonomous Indoor Mobility

Abstract

Indoor mobility at low cost is a very important challenge — both technically and economically. One prerequisite for this is a sensor system that obtains fast and reliable information on the environment. Low-cost sensory devices, however, exhibit a number of severe shortcomings. In order to achieve robust functionality based on low-cost ultrasonic sensors, synergetic use of information provided by multiple sensory devices is indispensable.

The sensor fusion techniques have veen found to depend haevily on the specific task at hand. This is demonstrated in this paper for the obstacle avoidance task and the self-localisation task. Extensive experiments on our hardware platforms show the efficiency of our approach.

Significant further performance improvements can be expected to result from the use of advanced multisonar sensing principles and intelligent sensing strategies.