First Advisor

Marek A. Perkowski

Date of Publication

2-12-1993

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering

Language

English

Subjects

Matching theory, Sonar, Mobile robots

DOI

10.15760/etd.6514

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, xi, 136 p.)

Abstract

The PSUBOT (pronounced pea-es-you-bought) is an autonomous wheelchair robot for persons with certain disabilities. Its use of voice recognition and autonomous navigation enable it to carry out high level commands with little or no user assistance. We first describe the goals, constraints, and capabilities of the overall system including path planning and obstacle avoidance. We then focus on localization-the ability of the robot to locate itself in space. Odometry, a compass, and an algorithm which matches points to lines are each employed to accomplish this task. The matching algorithm (which matches "points" to "lines") is the main contribution to this work. The .. points" are acquired from a rotating sonar device, and the "lines" are extracted from a user-entered line-segment model of the building. The algorithm assumes that only small corrections are necessary to correct for odometry errors which inherently accumulate, and makes a correction by shifting and rotating the sonar image so that the data points are as close as possible to the lines. A modification of the basic algorithm to accommodate parallel lines was developed as well as an improvement to the basic noise removal algorithm. We found that the matching algorithm was able to determine the location of the robot to within one foot even when required to correct for as many as five feet of simulated odometry error. Finally, the algorithm's complexity was found to be well within the processing power of currently available hardware.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/26751

Download

Share

COinS