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Main Authors: Giurea, Adelina, Luchie, Stijn, Coppens, Dieter, Hoebeke, Jeroen, De Poorter, Eli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01018
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author Giurea, Adelina
Luchie, Stijn
Coppens, Dieter
Hoebeke, Jeroen
De Poorter, Eli
author_facet Giurea, Adelina
Luchie, Stijn
Coppens, Dieter
Hoebeke, Jeroen
De Poorter, Eli
contents This paper presents an infrastructure-free approach for obstacle detection and environmental mapping using ultra-wideband (UWB) radar mounted on a mobile robotic platform. Traditional sensing modalities such as visual cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) fail in environments with poor visibility due to darkness, smoke, or reflective surfaces. In these vision-impaired conditions, UWB radar offers a promising alternative. To this end, this work explores the suitability of robot-mounted UWB radar for environmental mapping in anchor-free, unknown scenarios. The study investigates how different materials (metal, concrete and plywood) and UWB radio channels (5 and 9) influence the Channel Impulse Response (CIR). Furthermore, a processing pipeline is proposed to achieve reliable mapping of detected obstacles, consisting of 3 steps: 1) target identification (based on CIR peak detection); 2) filtering (based on peak properties, signal-to-noise score, and phase-difference of arrival); and 3) clustering (based on distance estimation and angle-of-arrival estimation). The proposed approach successfully reduces noise and multipath effects, achieving high obstacle detection performance across a range of materials. Even in challenging low-reflectivity scenarios such as concrete, the method achieves a precision of 73.42% and a recall of 83.38% on channel 9. This work offers a foundation for further development of UWB-based localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems that do not rely on visual features and, unlike conventional UWB localisation systems, do not require fixed anchor nodes for triangulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01018
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Integration of UWB Radar on Mobile Robots for Continuous Obstacle and Environment Mapping
Giurea, Adelina
Luchie, Stijn
Coppens, Dieter
Hoebeke, Jeroen
De Poorter, Eli
Robotics
This paper presents an infrastructure-free approach for obstacle detection and environmental mapping using ultra-wideband (UWB) radar mounted on a mobile robotic platform. Traditional sensing modalities such as visual cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) fail in environments with poor visibility due to darkness, smoke, or reflective surfaces. In these vision-impaired conditions, UWB radar offers a promising alternative. To this end, this work explores the suitability of robot-mounted UWB radar for environmental mapping in anchor-free, unknown scenarios. The study investigates how different materials (metal, concrete and plywood) and UWB radio channels (5 and 9) influence the Channel Impulse Response (CIR). Furthermore, a processing pipeline is proposed to achieve reliable mapping of detected obstacles, consisting of 3 steps: 1) target identification (based on CIR peak detection); 2) filtering (based on peak properties, signal-to-noise score, and phase-difference of arrival); and 3) clustering (based on distance estimation and angle-of-arrival estimation). The proposed approach successfully reduces noise and multipath effects, achieving high obstacle detection performance across a range of materials. Even in challenging low-reflectivity scenarios such as concrete, the method achieves a precision of 73.42% and a recall of 83.38% on channel 9. This work offers a foundation for further development of UWB-based localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems that do not rely on visual features and, unlike conventional UWB localisation systems, do not require fixed anchor nodes for triangulation.
title Integration of UWB Radar on Mobile Robots for Continuous Obstacle and Environment Mapping
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01018