抄録
The authors have developed a new type laser range finder, which enables a mobile robot to measure the distance to a natural object located one to five meters ahead with an error less than two percents. The system uses laser as weak as 1[mW], a safe level for human eyes, and is workable under bright daytime sunlight of about 100, 000[lx]. This laser range finder can quickly process data while compensating the motional error induced by the robot on which it is mounted and makes real time measurements of objects located ahead.
This laser range finder is featured by plural redundant range measuring systems and a newly introduced real time signal processing technique of the redundant signals. The laser range finder shows strong noise reduction characteristic by acting together with two conventional methods, namely, conventional optical filtering which preliminarily eliminates noise and the DDD signal processing proposed by the authors for separating reflected pulseform signals from ambient light on video signals.
The effectiveness of the proposed laser range finder system was demonstrated under direct sunlight by an experimental model mounted with two CCD cameras and a semiconductor laser projector of 1[mW] output power with 830[nm] wave length.
