Sensor Fusion in Certainty Grids for Mobile Robots

A numeric representation of uncertain and incomplete sensor knowledge called certainty grids was used successfully in several recent mobile robot control programs developed at the Carnegie-Mellon University Mobile Robot Laboratory (MRL). Certainty grids have proven to be a powerful and efficient unifying solution for sensor fusion, motion planning, landmark identification, and many other central problems. MRL had good early success with ad hoc formulas for updating grid cells with new information. A new Bayesian statistical foundation for the operations promises further improvement. MRL proposes to build a software framework running on processors onboard the new Uranus mobile robot that will maintain a probabilistic, geometric map of the robot's surroundings as it moves.