An Efficient Sensor Fusion Technique for Obstacle Detection

Sensor fusion has an important role in today’s life, especially in the smart world where devices are becoming smarter. Smart devices require reliable and different types of sensory data, fusing them to obtain better information regarding their objectives. Different types of sensors are often fused to acquire information which cannot be acquired by a single sensor alone. Working with several types of sensors in practical applications involve several uncertainties that can be overcome using sensor fusion techniques. Sensor fusion is most commonly used in mobile robotics for obstacle detection and navigation. The sensor fusion techniques that have been developed so far for detecting an obstacle are costly and complex. So a new technique is proposed which can detect an obstacle, judge its distance using infrared and ultrasonic sensor with the help of an FPGA. Here we propose a sensor fusion technique in which central limit theorem is used as fusion algorithm. The hardware implementation has been done on Papilio one board and sensor interfacing codes are written in Arduino. Finally we have done sensor fusion in MATLAB. The proposed technique aims to make cost effective, faster and less complex system for sensor fusion. KeywordsSensor fusion; FPGA; Arduino IDE; Central Limit Theorem; Papilio one board.