Road edge recognition for mobile robot using laser range finder

This paper discusses the research status of road recognition for mobile robots, and presents a new method of applying laser range finder to obtain road edge points in order to solve the road recognition problems of outdoor mobile robot. This method makes full use of the advantages of laser range finder such as high accuracy and rapid data acquirement, and can realise the recognition of road edge in real-time. The road boundary recognition algorithm including the feature extraction and coordinate calculation is proposed. The fuzzy rules based data partition and the line-shape fitting using least square method are described. Finally, an experiment is conducted on an even road using a LT3 laser range finder installed on an omnidirectional mobile robot and the experimental result shows the proposed method to be effective.