R. Gutierrezosuna et al., MODELING OF ULTRASONIC RANGE SENSORS FOR LOCALIZATION OF AUTONOMOUS MOBILE ROBOTS, IEEE transactions on industrial electronics, 45(4), 1998, pp. 654-662
This paper presents a probabilistic model of ultrasonic range sensors
using backpropagation neural networks trained on experimental data. Th
e sensor model provides the probability of detecting mapped obstacles
in the environment, given their position and orientation relative to t
he transducer. The detection probability can be used to compute the lo
cation of an autonomous vehicle from those obstacles that are more lik
ely to be detected. The neural network model is more accurate than oth
er existing approaches, since it captures the typical multilobal detec
tion pattern of ultrasonic transducers. Since the network size is kept
small, implementation of the model on a mobile robot can be efficient
for real-time navigation. An example that demonstrates how the creden
ce could be incorporated into the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the
numerical values of the final neural network weights are provided in
the Appendixes.