The model of an environment plays a crucial role in autonomous mobile robots, by providing them with the necessary task-relevant information. As robots become more intelligent, they need a richer and more expressive environment model. This model is a map that contains a structured description of the environment that can be used as the robot’s knowledge for several tasks, such as planning and reasoning.
In this paper, we present a sonar-based navigation system, designed to deploy a fleet of autonomous mobile platforms at a reasonable cost. In educational and hobbyist contexts, a large number of robots is required. By means of classical navigation approaches, every robot should be provided with accurate vision or range sensors. This limits the maximum number of robots in the fleet, due to the unaffordable cost of these sensors. In contrast to that, our system requires a single platform equipped with a higher quality sensor, used to perform calibration and mapping tasks.
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