Development of an Automatically Steered Vehicle Controlled with Multisensor

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In order to decrease driver's duty and avoid traffic accidents, it becomes important to develop automatically steered vehicles. Therefore, some automatically steered vehicles have been developed in the world since 1985. The most difficult problem in this development is to make collision avoidance systems that have environmental sensors whose reliability. However, most of environmental sensors for collision avoidance have poor performance if they are used alone. Thus, some methods to fuse information obtained from CCD cameras and a scanning laser range finder were attempted. The methods to avoid collision by images obtained with CCD cameras require a very high-speed computer. In particular, the stereo view requires extremely high-speed computer to find corresponding points from two different images. Thus, the information obtained from CCD cameras has been used usually together with that obtained from the laser range finder.However, the minimum detectable range of the scanning laser range finder is more than 5m. This means that we cannot use it in the sort range detection within 5m. Therefore, the authors used ultrasonic sensors together with the scanning laser range finder and CCD cameras and fused the information obtained with one scanning laser range finder, eight ultrasonic sensors, and four CCD cameras.Experiments were carried out. In experiments, other sensors such as optical fiber gyroscope, steering angle sensor, angle sensor of tire, etc. were added to the above three kinds of sensors, and the information obtained with these many sensors was fused. Experimental results showed that an automatically steered vehicle designed by the authors has good performance and it can avoid collision with high reliability. In this paper, details of the mobile robots designed by the authors and a fusing method to increase performance and reliability for collision avoidance.