SIMULATING A LASER RANGE SCANNER UNDER APPLICATION CONDITIONS

This paper describes the simulation of a laser range scanner for wheeled mobile robot applications. The use of the simulator is intended for method development regarding navigation within dynamic environments and obstacle avoidance. The artificial environment is set up from a grid based probability map. The simulation unit is addressed through the same interface as the real sensor, and has real time capabilities. The focus of the paper lies in the description of computational efficient algorithms for emulating the range measurement in the grid based probability map and the consideration of artificial objects. It is shown, that the simulation is calculated using very little computational effort.