A Study on the Recognition Method of the Stair Size for the Climbing Mobile Robot

이동 로보트의 계단 승월을 위한 계단 크기 인식 기법에 관한 연구

A mobile robot in a nuclear power plant is usually needed to equip the ability of going up and down stairs for a some kind of inspection. For this purpose, it is necessary for the mobile robot to figure out the size of stairs laid on a navigation path to gurantee robot's moving freely. In this paper, to measure the size of stairs existing in front of a mobile robot we designed the stair size recognition unit which can measure the stair's height and width using an ultrasonic sensor and/or a CCD camera. Also to obtain higher reliability of ultrasonic sensing data we proposed the horizontal sensing method. On the assupmtions that the mobile robot generates a trajectory while ascending stairs, we simulated it on a IBM compatible computer. The result showed that the suggested method satisfied our purpose. In a stair size estimation, the detected stair's height error was about .+-.3mm, and width was about .+-.5mm.