MULTIPATH BAYESIAN MAP CONSTRUCTION-MODEL FROM SONAR DATA

A new model for the construction of a sonar map in a specular environm ent has been developed and implemented. In a real world, where most of the object surfaces are specular ones, a sonar sensor suffers from a multipath effect which results in a wrong interpretation of an object' s location. To reduce this effect and hence to construct a reliable ma p of a robot's surroundings, a probabilistic approach based on Bayesia n reasoning is adopted to both evaluation of object orientations and e stimation of an occupancy probability of a cell by an object. The usef ulness of this approach is illustrated with the results produced by ou r mobile robot equipped with ultrasonic sensors.