Control of Mobile Robot Navigation Using Vision Sensor Data Fusion by Nonlinear Transformation

Abstract

The robots that will be needed in the near future are human-friendly robots that are able to coexist with humans and support humans effectively. To realize this, robot need to recognize his position and direction for intelligent performance in an unknown environment. And the mobile robots may navigate by means of a number of monitoring systems such as the sonar-sensing system or the visual-sensing system. Notice that in the conventional fusion schemes, the measurement is dependent on the current data sets only. Therefore, more of sensors are required to measure a certain physical parameter or to improve the accuracy of the measurement. However, in this research, instead of adding more sensors to the system, the temporal sequence of the data sets are stored and utilized for the accurate measurement. As a general approach of sensor fusion, a UT -Based Sensor Fusion(UTSF) scheme using Unscented Transformation(UT) is proposed for either joint or disjoint data structure and applied to the landmark identification for mobile robot navigation. Theoretical basis is illustrated by examples and the effectiveness is proved through the simulations and experiments. The newly proposed, UT-Based UTSF scheme is applied to the navigation of a mobile robot in an unstructured environment as well as structured environment, and its performance is verified by the computer simulation and the experiment.