Laser Acquisition Control Method for Vehicle Position Measurement by Using Laser and Corner Cube Reflector

Abstract

This paper proposes a laser acquisition control method for a corner cube reflector (retroreflector).
We have been developing an active positioning system for roboted vehicle. This system is composed of vehicle-borne laser scanner and corner cube set on environment. The on-board laser scanner controlls the emissive direction of a laser beam so as to usually point to the corner cube. During this control, namely tracking control, the vehicle measures the directions of the beam and determines the own position by the trangulation principle.
In order to realize the positioning system, we have proposed a tracking control method by actively using the reflectional characteristics of corner cube, and performed the high accurated tracking. However the method has a disadvantage that the laser beam cannot reentry tracking if the beam once misses the corner cube.
This paper presents an acquisition control method which searches and captures the corner cube in order to continue the tracking. The acquisition control method is simply performed by using a fan-shaped laser beam. The experimental results using proto-type system show the effectiveness of the method.