Experimental Investigation of Robot Exploration with Ultrasonic Sensor in Unstructured Environment

A detecting method is presented for a robot with ultrasonic sensors in unstructured environment. Setting up a structure model of the detecting system and describing its operation principle, exploration experiments are done on some surfaces of unstructured environment, such as level plane, cambered surface, inclined plane and vertical plane. The experimental results show that ultrasonic sensor doesn't fit to detect the cambered surface. As for the other surfaces, different exploration strategies and data processing methods are developed by experimental study. The results include that three ultrasonic sensors are necessary to detect the inclined plane, and the compensation of patulous angle error as well as the dynamic error are necessary to detect level plane, vertical plane and so on.