This paper proposes a new method for estimating the position and orientation of a mobile robot in an indoor environment. The method is different from previous one in the way that the simply shaped objects, such as walls, corners and edges, called geometric elements, selected from the environment rather than artificial ones are used as landmarks. The mobile robot moves from a starting point to its target point along a designed path relying on its own sensors. When the mobile robot moves in an environment, it measures the distance to the geometric elements, uses the role of triangle geometry to estimate the position and the orientation of itself and corrects its path. The presented algorithm is especially suitable for processing the sonar scan data obtained by ultrasonic sensors with wide beam spread. The validity of the proposed method has been proved by experiments, and its performance investigated.
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