Autonomous Exploring System Based on Ultrasonic Sensory Information

An autonomous exploring system for a mobile robot is presented in this article. The system consists of an ultrasonic range sensor (URS) module and a novel method for building a map from exploration of an environment. Instead of random exploration, the proposed approach provides a systematic and efficient strategy to build the map by means of some preferential points. Taking a multitude of observations or measurements by sonar sensors, a mobile robot derives a virtual polygonal map from a set of regressed segments, partial prior known environmental information, and some inference rules for vertices. Additionally, the concept of safe zones is also introduced in the system to keep the mobile robot safe during exploration. Based on the identified virtual map, a searching method is used to select a next best observation to collect the most sufficient information. Several experiments are given to demonstrate the performance of this proposed approach.