The key motivation of this study is for a style of the sensor arrangement to have an effect on the localization performance of mobile robots in case of using sonar sensors. In general robot platforms with sonar sensors, sonar sensors are supposed to be radially arranged on their rotational axis of mobile robots. However, relevant limits to several functions required for their autonomous navigation occur unexpectedly, because a sonar sensor generally has the negative nature of its wide beam width together with the specular reflection. We present a new strategy of the sonar sensor arrangement capable of enhancing the localization performance. Sonar sensors are intended to be arranged nonradially (twistedly expressed in this paper) on their rotational axis. The localization scheme called STARER: Sonar-Twisted ARrangement localizER is based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) with occupancy grid maps. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed method for the localization of mobile robots.

ZnO nanorod gas sensors were prepared by an ultrasound radiation method and their gas sensing properties were investigated for NO gas. For this procedure, 0.01, 0.005 and 0.001M of zinc nitrate hydrate [Zn(NO3)2 · 6H2O] and hexamethyleneteramine [C6H12N4] aqueous solutions were prepared and then the solution was irradiated with high intensity ultrasound for 1 h. The lengths of ZnO nanorods ranged from 200 nm to 500 nm with diameters ranging from 40 nm to 80 nm. The size of the ZnO nanorods could be controlled by the concentration of solution. The sensing characteristics of these nanostructures were investigated for three kinds of sensor. The properties of the sensors were influenced by the morphology of the nanorods.

This study focuses on autonomous exploration based on map expansion for an underwater robot equipped with acoustic sonars. Map expansion is applicable to large-area mapping, but it may affect localization accuracy. Thus, as the key contribution of this paper, we propose a method for underwater autonomous exploration wherein the robot determines the trade-off between map expansion ratio and position accuracy, selects which of the two has higher priority, and then moves to a mission step. An occupancy grid map is synthesized by utilizing the measurements of an acoustic range sonar that determines the probability of occupancy. This information is then used to determine a path to the frontier, which becomes the new search point. During area searching and map building, the robot revisits artificial landmarks to improve its position accuracy as based on imaging sonar-based recognition and EKF-SLAM if the position accuracy is above the predetermined threshold. Additionally, real-time experiments were conducted by using an underwater robot, yShark, to validate the proposed method, and the analysis of the results is discussed herein.

It is very important for a mobile robot to recognize and model its environments for navigation. However, the grid map constructed by sonar sensors cannot accurately represent the environment, especially the narrow environment, due to the angular uncertainty of sonar data. Therefore, we propose a map building scheme which combines sonar sensors and IR sensors. The maps built by sonar sensors and IR sensors are combined with different weights which are determined by the degree of translational and rotational motion of a robot. To increase the effectiveness of sensor fusion, we also propose optimal sensor arrangement through various experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method can represent the environment such as narrow corridor and open door more accurately than conventional sonar sensor-based map building methods.

Improving practicality of SLAM requires various sensors to be fused effectively in order to cope with uncertainty induced from both environment and sensors. In this case, combining sonar and vision sensors possesses numerous advantages of economical efficiency and complementary cooperation. Especially, it can remedy false data association and divergence problem of sonar sensors, and overcome low frequency SLAM update caused by computational burden and weakness in illumination changes of vision sensors. In this paper, we propose a SLAM method to join sonar sensors and stereo camera together. It consists of two schemes, extracting robust point and line features from sonar data and recognizing planar visual objects using multi-scale Harris corner detector and its SIFT descriptor from pre-constructed object database. And fusing sonar features and visual objects through EKF-SLAM can give correct data association via object recognition and high frequency update via sonar features. As a result, it can increase robustness and accuracy of SLAM in indoor environment. The performance of the proposed algorithm was verified by experiments in home –like environment.