Research On Multisensor Fusion And Navigation For Robot Mower

With the development of economy, urban greening process has been accelerated rapidly and the lawn industry spring up around quickly. Every year, it will consume lots of resources to maintain the public lawns such as city turf, football field and golf yard. Furthermore, those traditional lawn mowers bring huge noise and produce exhaust gas into the air, which have a bad effect on somatopsychic health of the workers and pollute the environment directly. It is necessary to develop a kind of autonomous robot lawn mower in order to liberate labors from high repetition, boring and tiring mowing work.Firstly, this paper introduces and compares the existing robot mowers domestic and overseas. According to the characteristics and the development direction of the robot mower, this paper points out the key technologies for robot mower such as multisensor fusion, navigation technology, obstacle avoidance control and path planning technology.Secondly, this paper introduces the application of multisensor fusion technology using in mobile robots and builds the sensing system for the robot mower according to the design requirements, specific working condition and market price factors. Robot mowers work in unstructured environment, it is important for an autonomous robot mower to explore its surroundings in performing the task of localization and navigation for mowing. Because of the complexity of the environment, one simple kind of sensors is not sufficient for robot mower to accomplish these tasks. This paper presents a multisensor system for combining measurements from ultrasonic sensors and navigation for robot mowers. The proposed sensing system integrates ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, collision sensors, encoders, a temperature sensor and an electronic compass.Then, this paper presents a multi-ultrasonic sensor system for obstacle detecting and uses fuzzy neural network to fuse the information from the ultrasonic sensors, which improves the measurement precision effectively. And this method provides real-time and accurate control decision for the robot mower.Finally, this paper presents a method of mapping and localization for robot mower and uses the navigation strategy based on multisensor fusion for robot mower. The simulation results indicate that the multisensor system, multisensor fusion method and the method using in mapping, navigation and localization for robot mower are feasible and effective.