World modeling for an autonomous mobile robot using heterogenous sensor information

An Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) has to show both goal-oriented behavior and reflexive behavior in order to be considered fully autonomous. In a classical, hierarchical control architecture these behaviors are realized by using several abstraction levels while their individual informational needs are satisfied by associated world models. The focus of this paper is to describe an approach which utilizes heterogenous information provided by a laser-radar and a set of sonar sensors in order to achieve reliable and complete world models for both real-time collision avoidance and local path planning. The approach was tested using MOBOT-IV, which serves as a test-platform within the scope of a research project on autonomous mobile robots for indoor applications. Thus, the experimental results presented here are based on real data.