The Hough transform inside the feedback loop of a mobile robot

Accurate navigation of a mobile robot in cluttered rooms using a range measuring laser as a sensor is considered. The range weighted Hough transform (RWHT) is used to extract the directions and distances to the walls of the room. Using the extracted RWHT peaks in a feedback loop, the mobile robot is capable of a large variety of navigation tasks for navigating the robot through an open door detected by the laser, the accuracy during passage was found experimentally to be 1 cm at a speed of 0.5 m/s. For navigating through corridors, the accuracy was better than 1 cm at the maximum speed, 0.8 m/s, of the robot. Odometric data and laser measurements are combined using the extended Kalman filter. During motion, the size of the cluttered rectangular room is estimated as well as the position and the orientation (pose) of the robot. The navigation is very robust against both spurious laser measurements and disturbing objects