Localization and Navigation of Service Robots by means of M-Sequence UWB Radars

The use of service robots has become much more relevant in industry and retail in recent years. To be of best possible benefit to humans, an autonomous motion ability of the service robots is of central importance. This requires that the robot can perceive its surroundings as precisely as possible by using different sensors and their fusion. In contrast to optical sensors, an UWB sensor can, for example, detect small and almost invisible objects such as glass panes with high range resolution. In this paper, a signal processing chain for detection of the environment with M-sequence UWB sensors is proposed. The proposed chain includes pulse reconstruction based on calibration measurements, background subtraction, object detection based on CFAR techniques, and multi-target tracking based on the Kalman filter and the nearest-neighbor approach.