Ultrasonic sensors have been widely applied in mobile robots to obtain environmental information and avoid obstacles. In general, a typical domestic environment consists of planes, edges and corners. It is usually difficult to distinguish a plane from a corner directly with a single ultrasonic sensor. To overcome this difficulty, a corner differentiation algorithm for a single ultrasonic sensor is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is based on the features of all of the actual reflection points from the environment obtained by a reflection search algorithm from which the corners are realized by a corner differentiation algorithm. The experimental results show that the developed algorithm can successfully detect all planes and corners. Furthermore, an environmental map can be built based on the information obtained on planes and corners.
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