Straight-line path following in cleaning robots using lateral ultrasonic sensors

Floor cleaning is a typical mobile robot application. In general, the cleaning operation requires an algorithm for real-time path generation for complete floor coverage, however, a mobile robot has many problems to follow a given path because on the on board sensors error. In this paper, a procedure for straight-line parallel path following using lateral ultrasonic measurements is introduced. The procedure does not require the use of specific landmarks and is based on the creation of a reference lateral distance vector that can be used during the cleaning procedure to align the robot in consecutive parallel paths.