Location by collision

The author shows how it is possible to establish location without adding to or modifying the environment. The only sensors required in the scheme are proximity or touch sensors. As the robot moves about its environment it may on occasion collide with environment or object boundaries. The distance between collisions can be used to recalibrate the robot´s positon. A collision, after all, unambiguously locates a robot on a line or curve in a 2D representation of the environment, where these lines or curves in the environment map represent the region or object boundaries. The distance between collisions provides considerable information for robot positioning. A probabilistic approach is presented to determining the most likely collision point after a sequence of collisions