A Fast and Accurate Sonar-Ring Sensor for a Mobile Robot - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

A Fast and Accurate Sonar-Ring Sensor for a Mobile Robot

Teruko Yata, Akihisa Ohya, and Shin'ichi Yuta
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 1, pp. 630 - 636, May, 1999

Abstract

A sonar-ring is one of the most popular sensors for indoor mobile robots, because it is simple and gives omni-directional distance information directly. However, it is difficult to measure the accurate direction of reflecting points by a conventional sonar-ring sensor. Further more, conventional sonar-ring sensors are slow to get full 360 degrees information due to sequential driving of transducers for avoiding interference. In this paper, we propose a new sonar-ring sensor system for a mobile robot which can measure the accurate bearing angles of reflecting objects in a single measurement. The proposed system employs the measurement by using differences of time-of-flight and by simultaneous transmit/receive of all directions, and consequently achieved fast measurement. We implemented a prototype of the proposed sonar-ring on a mobile robot. The experimental data show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

BibTeX

@conference{Yata-1999-14912,
author = {Teruko Yata and Akihisa Ohya and Shin'ichi Yuta},
title = {A Fast and Accurate Sonar-Ring Sensor for a Mobile Robot},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {1999},
month = {May},
volume = {1},
pages = {630 - 636},
}