Space and time sensor fusion for mobile robot navigation

This paper proposes a sensor-fusion technique where the data sets for the previous moments are properly transformed and fused into the current data sets to enable accurate measurement, such as, distance to an obstacle and location of the service robot itself. In the conventional fusion schemes, the measurement is dependent on the current data sets. As the results, more sensors are required to measure a certain physical parameter or to improve the accuracy of the measurement. However, in this approach, instead of adding more sensors to the system, the temporal sequence of the data sets are stored and utilized for the measurement improvement. The theoretical basis is illustrated by examples and the effectiveness is proved through the simulations. Finally, the new space and time sensor fusion (STSF) scheme is applied to the control of a mobile robot in an unstructured environment as well as a structured environment.