A FUZZY APPROACH TO BUILD SONAR MAPS FOR MOBILE ROBOTS

This paper addresses the problem of building environment models from s ensor observations. In particular, real world data, acquired by the ul trasonic sensors of a mobile robot, is used to obtain a 2-D polygonal approximation of the environment outline. Since the system works with inaccurate and noisy data, a way to represent uncertainty and to propa gate it through all the steps involved in map building is also conside red, so that not only a plausible outline, but also the confidence on this outline, is obtained. Fuzzy sets are used to represent the uncert ainty in the location of the object boundaries. The degrees of members hip indicate the similarity of a given boundary to other boundaries lo cated in the proximity. The approach is illustrated by experiments in an office environment.