A method to LRF noise filtering for the transparent obstacle in mobile robot indoor navigation environment with straight glass wall

Abstract

Laser Range finder (LRF) is one of the promising sensors for mobile robot indoor navigation since it can give plentiful information by high accuracy, high resolution and high speed. But, many indoor environments have various kinds of transparent obstacles such as glass and they may lead to many noises when LRF is applied. Sometimes, these noises result in wrong positioning of obstacles and thereafter wrong action of the robot. Therefore, many other applications use not only LRF but also additional sonar-like sensors to cope with this problem. And, the use of these additional sensors makes the whole system to be more complex and more expensive. In this paper, a method to LRF noise filtering for transparent obstacle is addressed from the insight that human sensing mechanism uses the fusion of more data with different view directions or different measurement locations. And, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the real robot experiment.