Multisensor fusion and navigation for robot mower

This paper presents a multisensor system for combining measurements from ultrasonic sensors and navigation for robot mowers. The proposed sensing system enables robot mowers to mapping unknown environments. It is important for an autonomous robot mower to explore its surroundings in performing the task of localization and navigation for mowing. Because of the complexity of the environment, one simple kind of sensors is not sufficient for robot mower to accomplish these tasks. We develop a robot mower equipped with DSP TMS320F2812 as its CPU. The sensing system integrates with ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, collision sensors, encoders, a temperature sensor and an electronic compass. A method of high accuracy ultrasonic ranging technology based on wavelet transform is reported to improve the measurement precision of ultrasonic sensors. Simulation studies show that the proposed multisensor fusion method is very effective for the navigation of robot mowers. Experimental results indicate that this sensing system based on generalized auto-correlation method for obstacle detection and localization shows great potential for providing a high performance-to-price ratio and robust solution for robot mowers in dynamic working condition.