begin diverge for all tested cases. These experiments
cannot be made using AEA, because it is based in an
incremental way which would lead the robot to
collide with the walls in the environment.
These experiments were important to show that
the SLAMVITA sensors disposition in the panning
turret and its simple types (visual, infrared and
sonar) allow solving the SLAM problem using a
low-cost mobile robot.
The proposed solution presented in this article in
comparison to others works that deal with indoor
SLAM using low-cost mobile robot, such as
presented by (Vazquez and Malcolm, 2005), does
not have restriction to navigate the robot nearby the
environment walls in function of the short
measurement range of the infrared sensors to build
the mapping environment. Moreover, only 4 sensors
are employed in SLAMVITA robot, and due to
theirs different principle of operations, the measure
noises can be solved by the proposed sensor data
fusion algorithm, mainly considering the
complementary fusion method. This is the case were
one of two directional sensor (vision or infrared) has
not measures at a specific angular area of the scan.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The environment mapping is an important task for
many purposes that the mobile robots might
perform, normally requiring sensor data fusion. A
mobile robot was constructed employing three
different sensor types: visual (wireless camera and
laser pointer), infrared (two units) and sonar.
This paper presents the tests of three software
modules that run in a cooperative way to solve the
indoor SLAM problem: a) a sensor data fusion
algorithm; b) a version of particle filter (FastSLAM
1.0); and c) an autonomous featured-based
exploration algorithm.
The results experiments presented show that
there are no significant differences when the
environment exploration task is performed with or
without autonomous exploration. In other word,
choose better positions to acquire the environment
measures are solved by proposed autonomous
algorithm. The estimated maps constructed by the
filter, which represent the environment, are
consistent for robot navigation purpose.
Currently the solution for a larger environment,
around 80 meters in length with some loop situations
is under development with satisfactory partial
results. The experiments in larger environments aim
to consistently validate all software modules
developed in this research. Both the estimated poses
and map must hold the consistency obtained in the
experiments presented in this article.
The main contribution of this research is to solve
the indoor SLAM problem using a low-cost mobile
platform that requires low computational load using
the overall system intelligence running in a PC
computer and embedded in the robot constructed
with simplified hardware and software.
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