The design of practical mapping system for mobile robots using laser range sensor

This paper proposed an efficient mapping system which has been implemented on a mobile cart equipped with a laser range sensor and dead reckoning sensors. The practical mapping system to generate accurate maps in unknown environments is one of the main requirements for mobile robots. The mapping system is divided into hardware and software parts. The hardware part, mobile cart, consisted of two encoders, a laser range sensor and a DSP board. Two encoders mounted on each back wheel of the mobile cart measure the distance traveled. The laser range sensor measures the distance from the nearest object to the sensor. The DSP board synchronizes the measured data from the encoders and the laser sensor and provides them to software part. The software part builds a metric map in the environment based on extended Kalman filter (EKF) localization that takes into account both the distance traveled by encoders and the information gathered by laser sensor to estimating the position of mobile cart. The proposed system accommodates the demand for the modest and user-friendly mapping system which can be used to explore and construct the map into the robot environment. This strategy is based on a human-interactive system design and a strong mathematical foundations research; this is the distinctive feature of our approach and constitutes the main original contribution of this paper.