Dempster-Shafer theory for sensor fusion in autonomous mobile robots

This article discusses Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory in terms of its utility for sensor fusion for autonomous mobile robots. It exploits two little used components of DS theory: the weight of conflict metric and the enlargement of the frame of discernment. The weight of conflict is used to measure the amount of consensus between different sensors. A lack of consensus leads the robot to either compensate within certain limits or investigate the problem further, adding robustness to the robot's operation. Enlarging the frame of discernment allows a modular decomposition of evidence. This decomposition offers the advantages of perceptual abstraction, and permits expert knowledge about the domain to be embedded in the frames of discernment, simplifying the construction and maintenance of the knowledge base. Six experiments using this Dempster-Shafer framework are presented. Data from four types of sensor data were collected by a mobile robot and fused with the sensor fusion effects (SFX) architecture.