Thermal path following robot vehicle: Sensor design and motion control

Introduces the concept of short-lived navigational markers (SLNMs) which represent a group of techniques for indicating the path taken by a mobile robot. Information provided by marking the robot trajectory can be of direct assistance in a number of navigation tasks. The short-lived nature of the markers has the advantage that it is not necessary to remove them after use. However, the varying intensity of the SLNMs complicates the process of detecting and following the robot path. Heat is one form of SLNM being investigated and this paper describes a pyroelectric sensor which has been developed to detect thermal paths created by heating the floor with a quartz halogen bulb. Three control strategies for following the thermal trail have been developed and tested. A strategy based on Kalman filtering gives the best performance. Details of the control strategies are presented together with experimental results showing how they performed in practice.