A Door Lintel Locator Sensor for Mobile Robot Topological Navigation

During the navigation, the event detection is an important issue, because the success of a task depends on it. In this work the authors show a sonar sensorial device which detects door lintels. The system consists of a sonar aiming to the roof and a software module called virtual sonar. The goal of this device is to proportionate additional information to a topological navigation system in a mobile robot. This sensor provides an event input in the topological navigation system named AURON. AURON navigation system is based on a succession of sensorial events and sensorimotor actions. The more environment information the easier navigation is, avoiding the robot getting lost and relocalization process. AD mobile robot architecture is made up of a Deliberative level and an Automatic one. Virtual sensors, as the sonar sensor presented in this paper, are included in the automatic level.