Vehicle navigation by fuzzy cognitive maps using sonar and RFID technologies

Emerging concept of the so-called intelligent space (IS) offers means for use of mobile autonomous devices like vehicles or robots in a very broad area without necessity for these devices to own all necessary sensors. From this reason also new navigation methods are developing, which utilize IS means, with the aim to offer maybe not so accurate but first of all cheep and reliable solutions for a wide variety of devices. Our paper deals with the examination of possibility to interconnect sparsely deployed RFID tags with sonars. As signals produced by these two technologies are often affected by uncertainty and incompleteness we use fuzzy logic for their processing as well as control of the entire navigation process. For this purpose a special type of a fuzzy cognitive map was proposed. The paper describes real navigation experiments with a simple vehicle and evaluates them by selected criteria. Based on obtained results their explanations and conclusions for potential future research are sketched.

I. Introduction

Usually, a camera is meant as a typical sensor for navigation. However, this approach has also some limits concerning its useability, e.g. visibility range, dependence on illumination conditions, or simply a prohibition of visual information sensing from some reasons. Further, image processing is mostly computationally consuming and requires nontrivial adjustment further parameters. Usually, other kinds of additional sensors are necessary for solving navigation problems, too.