DEMPSTER-SHAFER THEORY FOR SENSOR FUSION IN AUTONOMOUS MOBILE ROBOTS

This article discusses Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory in terms of its uti lity for sensor fusion for autonomous mobile robots, It exploits two l ittle used components of DS theory: the weight of conflict metric and the enlargement of the frame of discernment, The weight of conflict is used to measure the amount of consensus between different sensors, A lack of consensus leads the robot to either compensate within certain limits or investigate the problem further, adding robustness to the ro bot's operation. Enlarging the frame of discernment allows a modular d ecomposition of evidence, This decomposition offers the advantages of perceptual abstraction, and permits expert knowledge about the domain to be embedded in the frames of discernment, simplifying the construct ion and maintenance of the knowledge base. Six experiments using this Dempster-Shafer framework are presented, Data from four types of senso r data were collected by a mobile robot and fused with the Sensor Fusi on Effects (SFX) architecture.