Consecutive scanning based obstacle detection and probabilistic navigation of a mobile robot

This paper presents the obstacle detection algorithm based on the consecutive range sensor scanning scheme and the probabilistic navigation for an mobile robot. For a known environment, a mobile robot scans the environment using the range sensor which can rotate 360°. The environment is rebuilt using nodes of two adjacent walls, and an obstacle is detected by comparing characteristic points of both the known environment and the scanned data set. It is very useful for detecting the moving obstacle. By comparing two data sets, the movement of an obstacle is extracted. Furthermore, the consecutive scanning data set provides obstacle information in unknown environment. Geometric comparison between the two consecutive data sets is used to detect the obstacles and the algorithm is presented with both simulation and experimental results. After the obstacle information is extracted from the consecutive scanning, the path is rebuilt by checking the collision probability.