An intelligent integrated sensor system for the ORNL mobile robot

The mobile robot prototypes developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Center for Engineering Systems Advanced Research (CESAR) are equipped with sonar sensors and CCD cameras that are used to support autonomous navigation and simple inspection tasks in an a priori unknown and unstructured dynamic environment. A laser range camera is being added to the sensor suite of HERMIES III, a mobile robot that is currently being built. The authors summarize work directed at extracting information from data collected with these sensors and integrating it, in order to produce reliable descriptions of the robot´s environment. Specifically, they describe the integration of two-dimensional vision and sonar range information. The integration methodology is based on a framework for multisensor integration that consists of multiple, distributed world models and appropriate mappings among them. All operations are carried out onboard the mobile robot using a 16-processor hypercube computer