Hi Patrick,

You gave me a good idea. I'll try to modify our robots head and put a Sharp
sensor on it (we have some of the very same that type you used) and see if I
can somehow validate the data coming from the sonar sensor. Worth a try...

Bence Magyar

2010/11/10 Patrick Goebel <patrick@casbs.stanford.edu>

> Hi Jolin and Bence,
>
> I have found that using a long range IR sensor works better than sonar
> when trying to substitute for a laser scanner in the ROS navigation
> stack.  You can see my results here:
>
> http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0014/
>
> Most of the hard work behind these results was done by Mike Ferguson
> from Vanadium Labs who makes the ArbotiX microcontroller.  We used the
> ArbotiX with an AX-12+ servo and a Sharp GP2Y0A02YK IR sensor (range 0.2
> meters - 1.5 meters).  Mike wrote firmware routines for the ArbotiX to
> get 30 IR readings per 1 second sweep of the servo.  He then wrote a ROS
> wrapper around the whole thing so we could use it with the navigation
> stack.  You can see our whole discussion on the project at:
>
> http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=4410
>
> Note that I have only used this setup for obstacle avoidance and
> navigation by dead reckoning via RViz.  Mike has done more extensive
> tests with gmapping and his conclusion so far is that the panning IR
> just doesn't give enough data to get consistent results.  However, you
> can still go a long way with obstacle avoidance and path planning even
> without full SLAM.
>
> Patrick Goebel
> Behavioral Sciences
> Stanford University
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