The main goal of our work is to have a robot navigating in unknown and not specially structured environments, and performing delivery like tasks. This robot has both unreliable sonar and infrared sensors. To cope with unreliability a sensor fusion method is needed. The main problem when applying classical fusion methods is that there is no a priori model of the environment, just because the rob...

In this work, we examine the problem of constructing and maintaining a map of an autonomous vehicle’s environment for the purpose of navigation, using evidential reasoning. The inherent uncertainty in the origin of measurements of sensors demands a probabilistic approach to processing, or fusing, the new sensory information to build an accurate map. In this paper, the map is based on a two-dime...

Robotics research is dependent on intelligent, fast, accurate, reliable, and cheap sensors. Sonar sensing can fulfill these requirements. Moreover, sonar physics provides robotics researchers with a natural selection capability for landmark detection in navigation problems. This paper presents a new sonar system that produces accurate measurement and on-the-fly single cycle classification of pl...

Autonomous selective spraying could be a way for agriculture to reduce production costs, save resources, protect the environment and help to fulfill specific pesticide regulations. The objective of this paper was to investigate the use of a low-cost sonar sensor for autonomous selective spraying of single plants. For this, a belt driven autonomous robot was used with an attached 3-axes frame wi...

Conventional active sonar processing systems typically reduce the sensor data from an intensity map to a pointmeasurement form via a detection thresholding process. This approach is often sufficient for detecting and tracking high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) targets but becomes more challenging for low SNR targets. Track-Before-Detect (TkBD) is an alternative tracking technique that supplies ra...

The goal of our research is to give mobile robots the ability to deal with real world instructions outdoors such as “Go down to the big tree and turn left.” Inherent in such a paradigm is the robot being able to recognize a “big tree” and do it in unstructured environments without too many pre-mapped fixed landmarks. Ultimately we envision mobile robots that unobtrusively mix in with pedestrian...

This study investigates the processing of sonar signals using neural networks for robust differentiation of commonly encountered features in indoor robot environments. Differentiation of such features is of interest for intelligent systems in a variety of applications. Different representations of amplitude and time-of̄ight measurement patterns acquired from a real sonar system are processed. In...

Recent changes in the design of enemy threats such as submarines and technological achievements sensor development have paved way for multistatic sonar applications, which increase security situational awareness underwater tactical operations. Previously, coverage networks (MSSN) was studied using Cassini ovals traditional detection model two dimensions without any discussion practicability fea...

In this paper, we describe how an active radar/sonar imaging problem may be formulated as a virtual passive sensor array processing problem. We consider an active sensing problem where it is desired to form a range-Doppler image at a slowtime rate, even though the radar/sonar can transmit pulses at a fast time rate. By transmitting pulses at the fast time rate we can estimate the second-order s...

An ongoing research effort at the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) has included the development of multistatic sonar fusion and tracking technology for effective undersea surveillance. This paper summarizes the progress in this area, and identifies the sensor management tasks that are of current interest. In particular, we study the potential value-added of adaptive data thresholding based ...