Sensor Integration on a Mobile Robot

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show an application of path planning for a mobile pneumatic robot. The robot is capable of searching for a specific target in the scene and navigating towards it, in an a priori unknown environment. To accomplish this task, the robot uses a colour pan-tilt camera and two ultrasonic sensors. As the camera is only used for target tracking, the robot is left with very incomplete sensor data with a high degree of uncertainty. To counter this, a fuzzy logic based sensor fusion procedure is set up to aid the map building process in constructing a reliable environmental model. The significance of this work is that it shows that the use of fuzzy logic based fusion and potential field navigation can achieve good results for path planning.