Mobile robot localization using two sonar sensors and one natural landmark

This paper presents a novel methods for estimating the position and orientation of a mobile robot using only sonar range data in an indoor environment. The mobile robot senses the environment with two sonar sensors as it moves. It utilizes the specular characteristic to recognize an edge and by referring to the location of the edge, the robot localizes itself rapidly. The data obtained by sensors at time t-1 can be used at time t, and are utilized to get the current position of a mobile robot. The presented algorithms are especially suitable for processing the sonar scan data obtained by ultrasonic sensors with wide beam spread. The validity of the proposed methods have been proved by experiments, and their performances are also investigated.