Sensor Fusion for Intelligent Behavior on Small Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Sensors commonly mounted on small unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) include visible light and thermal cameras, scanning LIDAR, and ranging sonar. Sensor data from these sensors is vital to emerging autonomous robotic behaviors. However, sensor data from any given sensor can become noisy or erroneous under a range of conditions, reducing the reliability of autonomous operations. We seek to increase this reliability through data fusion. Data fusion includes characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of each sensor modality and combining their data in a way such that the result of the data fusion provides more accurate data than any single sensor. We describe data fusion efforts applied to two autonomous behaviors: leader-follower and human presence detection. The behaviors are implemented and tested in a variety of realistic conditions.