This paper presents a novel method, which enhances the use of external mechanisms by considering a multisensor system, composed of sonars and a CCD camera. Monocular vision provides redundant information about the location of the geometric entities detected by the sonar sensors. To reduce ambiguity significantly, an improved and more detailed sonar model is utilized. Moreover, Hough transform is used to extract features from raw sonar data and vision image. Information is fused at the level of features. This technique significantly improves the reliability and precision of the environment observations used for the simultaneous localization and map building problem for mobile robots. Experimental results validate the favorable performance of this approach.
