Design and application of distributed ultrasonic ranging system for autonomous mobile robots

A new design method of distributed ultrasonic ranging system based on multi-processor for mobile robots is put forward. This system consists of a high-level work method control unit and a low-level intelligent ultrasonic sensor array acted as the subsystem. In the low-level sensor array, each sensor is controlled by an individual micro-processor which completes the functions such as real-time data processing, interference rejecting, malfunction alarming, parallel communication, and etc. The high-level control unit employs different control strategies to make the low-level sensors grouped for working in parallel way. In the design of software, data processing adopts threshold comparison, advanced data shift average filter, and fuzzy information processing technology. These methods have improved the real-time, precision performance, reliability of the system, and robustness of mobile robot control. To testify the performance of the ultrasonic ranging system, this paper presents an experiment of mobile robot's moving object tracking based on active vision and ultrasonic information under an unknown, dynamic, unstructured complex environment. The experimental results show the proposed ranging system has high validity and reliability