Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
The International Journal of Robotics Research
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Web of Science (4)
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Barshan, B.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Directional Processing of Ultrasonic Arc Maps and its Comparison with Existing Techniques

Billur Barshan

Department of Electrical Engineering Bilkent University TR-06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey billur{at}ee.bilkent.edu.tr

A new technique for processing ultrasonic arc maps is proposed and compared to six existing techniques for map-building purposes. These techniques are simple point marking along the line-of-sight, voting and thresholding, morphological processing, Bayesian update scheme for occupancy grids, arc-transversal median algorithm, and triangulation-based fusion. The directional maximum technique, newly proposed in this paper, employs directional processing to extract the map of the environment from ultrasonic arc maps. It aims at overcoming the intrinsic angular uncertainty of ultrasonic sensors in map building, as well as eliminating noise and cross-talk related misreadings. The compared techniques are implemented with a wall-following motion-planning scheme for ground coverage. The comparison is based on experimental data and three complementary error criteria: mean absolute error, correct detection rate for full and empty regions, and computational cost in terms of CPU time. The directional maximum technique offers a very good compromise between mean absolute error and correct detection rate, with a processing time less than one-tenth of a second. Compared to the existing techniques, the directional maximum method is also superior in range accuracy and in eliminating artifacts, resulting in the best overall performance. The results indicate several trade-offs in the choice of ultrasonic arc-map processing techniques.

Key Words: sonars • range sensing • wheeled robots • sensing and perception

The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 26, No. 8, 797-820 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0278364907078888
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?