In any autonomous mobile robot, one of the most important issues to be designed and implemented is environment perception. In this paper, a new approach is formulated in order to perform sensory data integration for generation of an occupancy grid map of the environment. This method is an extended version of the Bayesian fusion method for independent sources; of information. The performance of the proposed method of fusion, and its sensitivity are discussed. Map building simulation for a cylindrical robot with eight ultrasonic sensors and-mapping implementation for a Khepera robot have been, separately tried, in simulation and experimental works. A new neural structure is introduced for conversion of proximity data that are;given by Khepera IR sensors to occupancy probabilities. Path planning experiments have also been applied to the resulting maps. For each map, two factors are considered and calculated: the fitness and the augmented occupancy of the map with respect to the ideal map. The length and the least distance to obstacles were the other two factors that were calculated for the routes that are resulted by path planning, experiments. Experimental and simulation results show that by using the new fusion formulas, more informative maps of the environment are obtained. By these maps more appropriate routes. could be achieved. Actually, there is a tradeoff between the length of the resulting routes, and their safety and by choosing the proper fusion function, this tradeoff is suitably tuned for different map building applications. (C) 2002 ISA-The Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society.
