A New Approach for Autonomous Robot Obstacle Avoidance Using PSD Infrared Sensor Combined with Digital Compass

This paper presents a new approach for obstacle avoidance of small mobile robots, which combine the position sensitive detector (PSD) with digital compass. It is important for an autonomous robot to explore its surroundings in performing the task of localization and navigation for searching. Because of the complexity of the environment, one simple kind of sensors is not sufficient for robot to accomplish these tasks. In this paper, the small mobile robots are enabled to identify barriers and distinguish surroundings by using the angle signal from the digital compass which is generally mounted on the robot. Experimental results indicate that this approach based on digital compass shows great potential in autonomous robot obstacle avoidance.