Implementation of an active optical range sensor using laser slit for in-door intelligent mobile robot

The sensor with real-time environment recognition ability is one of the key technologies for autonomous robots. The authors have designed and implemented a small size optical range sensor for their experimental mobile robot. The sensor consists of a laser slit generator, a CCD image sensor and a processing unit. Using this sensor, the real-time obstacle avoiding function is realized and added to the autonomous navigation aspect of the robot