An automatic position measurement approach for cylindrical objects

Laser range finder (LRF) is commonly utilized in a position measurement system to measure the locations of objects in an environment. Conventional approaches employ a laser range finder and a reference marker placed at the location of the object to measure the distance between them. The drawbacks of these methods are cost-ineffectiveness and labor consumption. Since cylindrical objects are commonly seen in our living environment, we propose an approach using a mobile robot equipped with a laser range finder to automatically measure the coordinates of cylindrical objects to save the labor. In our method, the near-optimal solution is obtained using the proposed adaptive distance method (ADM) and an extended Kalman filter (EKF). We validated the proposed method in the computer simulations on a Pioneer 3-DX robot.