A new space and time sensor fusion for vision-based navigation by mobile robot system

This paper proposes a sensor-fusion technique where the data sets for the previous moments are properly transformed and fused into the current data sets to enable accurate measurement, such as, distance to an obstacle and location of the mobile robot itself. In the conventional fusion schemes, the measurement is dependent on current data sets. As the results, more of sensors required to measure a certain physical parameter or to improve the accuracy of the measurement. However, in this approach, instead of adding more sensors to the system, the temporal sequence of the data sets are stored and utilized for the measurement improvement. Theoretical basis is illustrated by examples and the effectiveness is proved through the simulations and experiments. Finally, the new space and time sensor fusion (STSF) scheme is applied to the vision-based control of a mobile robot in an unstructured environment as well as structured environment.