Multi-ultrasonic sensor fusion for autonomous mobile robots

Specular reflections from environments cause uncertainties to ultrasonic sensor range data. In this paper, we examine the application of evidential method for data integration using the specially designed sensor model to overcome the problem. Dempster's rule of combination is used to fuse the sensor data to obtain the map defined on a 2D evidence grid. The sensor model tries to reduce the uncertainties caused by specular reflections with a filtering factor. Experimental results have shown the usefulness of this method.