Robotic Navigation And Mapping With Radar

A practical treatment of short-range radar processing for reliable object detection at ground level.

This pioneering book describes the development of a robot mapping and navigation system inspired by models of the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation in the rodent hippocampus. Computational models of animal navigation systems have traditionally had limited performance when implemented on robots. This is the first research to test existing models of rodent spatial mapping and navigation on robots in large, challenging, real world environments.

The monograph written by John Mullane, Ba-Ngu Vo, Martin Adams and Ba-Tuong Vo is devoted to the field of autonomous robot systems, which have been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the problem of representing the environment and its uncertainty in terms of feature based maps. Random Finite Sets are adopted as the fundamental tool to represent a map, and a general framework is proposed for feature management, data association and state estimation. The approaches are tested in a number of experiments on both ground based and marine based facilities.

Laser and Radar Based Robotic Perception looks at how perceptive laser and radar sensors provide information from the surrounding environment, a critical aspect of many robotics applications.

This book describes recent work on active sensors for mobile robots. An active sensor interacts with its surroundings to supply data on demand for a particular function, gathering and abstracting information according to need rather than acting as a generic data gatherer. Details of the physical operation are hidden. The book deals mainly with active range sensors, which provide rapid information for local planning, describing extraction of two-dimensional features such as lines, corners and cylinders to reconstruct a plan of a building. It is structured according to the physical principles of the sensors, since to a large extent these determine the function of the sensors and the methods of processing. Recent work using sonar, optoelectronic sensors and radar is described. Sections on vision and on sensor management develop the idea of software adaptation for efficient operation in a changing environment. Contents: The Mapping and Localisation Problem; Perception at Millimetre Wavelengths; Advanced Sonar: Principles of Operation and Interpretation; Smooth and Rough Target Modelling: Examples in Mapping and Texture Classification; Sonar Systems: A Biological Perspective; Map Building from Range Data Using Mathematical Morphology; Millimetre Wave Radar for Robotics; Optoelectronic Range Sensors; AMCW LIDAR Range Acquisition; Extracting Lines and Curves from Optoelectronic Range Data; Active Vision for Mobile Robot Navigation; Strategies for Active Sensor Management. Readership: Graduate students and final year undergraduate students in electrical and electronic engineering, systems and knowledge, robotics, image processing and artificial intelligence.

This book describes methods for making accurate radar measurements of short distances in applications where physical contact with materials is impractical. Sources of error are identified, and methods of reducing these errors are described. Practical test procedures for measuring instruments are also provided. Much of the book is dedicated to providing radar engineers with practical applications, detailing the conditions, equipment, and approach of experimental estimation. With the help of computer simulation, the achievable advantages in accuracy of radar range measurement with various approaches are revealed and quantitatively estimated. Readers are also provided with methods of random process theory and mathematical statistics, along with functional analysis and optimization.

The book addresses the latest advances in research and development in the field of informatics in control, robotics and automation. With more than twenty revised and extended articles covering the theoretical aspects as well as applications and their implementation, it offers a factual and well-balanced overview of the state of the art in the field. In addition, it highlights the trends in control of intelligent robots. The book is an up-to-date source of information and inspiration for researchers, engineers and PhD students.