THE USE OF LOW-COST FM-CW RADAR SENSORS IN NAVIGATION

Navigation of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) has traditionally been accomplished by means of fixed path navigation systems. The trend tow ards the use of such vehicles in unstructured external environments ha s led to a requirement for increasingly sophisticated sensory inputs. This paper describes the use of FM-CW radar for autonomous vehicle nav igation and the development of a real time test platform for their eva luation. Experimental results have been processed off-line using Matla b to extract range information. Real time performance was achieved usi ng a dual processor system comprising a Motorola 68000 single board co mputer for system control and supervision and a Texas Instruments Digi tal Signal Processor, TMS320C50, for performing 1024 point Fast Fourie r Transformation to convert a digitised radar return signal into a fre quency domain signal. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.