Ring Arrangement of Active Ranging Sensor for Autonomous Mobile Robot

Abstract

Distance measurement is essential for autonomous mobile robot. In this paper, development of a structured-light image based ranging system is addressed. In order to obtain omnidirectional distance data, the ranging sensor units are deployed in ring structure on a mobile robot. The omnidirectional distance information to surrounding objects is useful for making a local distance map and the self-localization of a mobile robot by matching the local map with a given global map. An efficient image processing algorithm, i.e., integration of difference images with structured-light modulation is proposed, which results in robust extraction of the structured-light pixels from a camera image against environmental ambient light. Experiments for the structured-light pixel extraction, distance computation, matching and localization are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed ranging system.