A novel ultrasonic sensing system for autonomous mobile systems

This paper presents a novel ultrasonic sensing system for autonomous mobile systems. We describe how wide-angled ultrasonic transducers can be used to obtain substantial information on the environment. This can be achieved by exploiting the overlapping of the detection cones from neighboring sensors. The ultrasonic sensing system also allows the detection of multiple echoes from different echo paths for each sensor. In this way a significantly higher number of echoes can be obtained in comparison to conventional ultrasonic sensing systems for mobile robots. In order to benefit from the increased sensor information, adequate data post-processing is required. In this context we describe how an environment model can be created from real ultrasonic sensor data.