Use of amplitude of echo for environment recognition by mobile robots

Abstract

Proposes a method of adding the amplitude of ultrasound echo from reflecting points. An omni-directional sonar which we developed, can measure accurate distance and direction of the reflecting points, and it is possible to measure amplitude of the echo which corresponds to the reflecting points. We propose a method to add information from the amplitude of the echo from the reflecting points for environment recognition. This method can give useful information such as character of reflecting objects and it makes possible to correspond each reflecting point with others using this information. We describe the proposed method and an experimental result to show its usefulness.