Dempster-Shafer theory for sensor fusion in autonomous mobile robots

This article presents the uncertainty management system used for the execution activity of the Sensor Fusion EEects (SFX) architecture. The SFX architecture is a generic sensor fusion system for autonomous mobile robots, suitable for a wide variety of sensors and environments. The execution activity uses the belief generated for a percept to either proceed with a task safely (e.g., navigate to a speciic location), terminate the task (e.g., can't recognize the location), or investigate the situation further in the hopes of obtaining suucient belief (e.g., what has changed?). Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory serves as the foundation for uncertainty management. The SFX implementation of DS theory incorporates evidence from sensor observations and domain knowledge into three levels of perceptual abstraction. It also makes use of the DS weight of connict metric to prevent the robot from acting on faulty observations. Experiments with four types of sensor data collected by a mobile robot are presented and discussed.