Following a wall by an autonomous mobile robot with a sonar-ring

Abstract

Presents a robust method for an autonomous mobile robot with a sonar-ring to follow walls. The sonar-ring consists of multiple ultrasonic range sensors. The proposed wall-following algorithm makes a robot able to follow a wall in various shapes such as a square wall, a circular wall etc. The autonomous mobile robot "Yamabico" is used for experiments after being equipped with a 12 directional sonar-ring. The on-board controller of the robot decides its motion based on sonar-ring range data every 3 centimeters going forward. The authors carried out many experiments with this autonomous mobile robot, and investigated the validity and the limits of this method.