" A Fast and Accurate Reflecting Points Measurable Sonar-Ring System "
by Teruko YATA, Akihisa OHYA, Shin'ichi YUTA

Journal of Robotics Society of Japan Vol.17, No.8.


Abstract

A sonar-ring is one of the most popular sensor for indoor mobile robots, because it is simple and gives omni-directional distance information directly. However, it is difficult to measure accurate bearing of reflecting points by a conventional sonar-ring sensor. And also, it is slow to get omni-directional information due to sequential driving of transducers for avoiding interference of ultrasound. 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. The proposed system employs both simultaneous transmission/receive of all directions and accurate bearing angle measurement using differences of time-of-flight, and consequently archived fast and accurate measurement. We implemented a prototype of the proposed sonar-ring on a mobile robot, and experimental data show the effectiveness of the proposed method.