An Active Omni-directional Range Sensor forMobile Robot Navigation

Abstract Most autonomous mobile robots view things only in front of them and as a result, they may collide with objects moving from the side or behind. To overcome this problem we have built an Active Omni-directional Range Sensor that can obtain an omni-directional depth data through the use of a laser conic plane and a conic mirror. In the navigation of the mobile robot, the proposed sensor system makes a laser conic plane by rotating the laser point source at high speed which creates a two-dimensional depth map, in real time, once an image is captured. Object recognition is possible using a three-dimensional depth map acquired from the combination of previously obtained two dimensional depth map. Also, since the proposed sensor system measures the actual distance of the target objects, it is able to apply the proposed sensor system to other measurement tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed sensor system has the best potential for object recognition and navigation of a mobile robot in an unknown environment.

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