Title
Challenges of designing a low-cost indoor localization system using active beacons
Abstract
Localization is very helpful for goal-oriented navigation of a mobile robot. In this article, we describe the challenges we faced when designing a low-cost indoor localization system that can be employed on consumer and domestic robots for the systematic navigation in household environments. Our system uses active beacons that project a pair of infrared (IR) spots onto the ceiling and a sensor on the robot which observes them. In order to reduce cost, we designed a 3-diode sensor, i.e. a three pixel camera, that measures directions to the spots. In contrast to e.g. a typical camera with VGA or higher resolution that would allow for a precise tracking of the beacon spots, our low-cost sensor suffers from multi-path, i.e. light not only reaches the sensor directly but also through reflections from walls and other furniture. We tackle this problem by a localization method that learns the light distribution in the room through a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach. Our experiments provide numbers on the accuracy and consistency of this method. The presented system is implemented on our Mint robot equipped with an ARM 7 processor and 64 kByte of RAM for the autonomous cleaning of floors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TePRA.2013.6556348
Technologies for Practical Robot Applications
Keywords
Field
DocType
slam (robots),cameras,ceilings,indoor environment,infrared imaging,microprocessor chips,mobile robots,object tracking,path planning,random-access storage,robot vision,service robots,3-diode sensor,arm 7 processor,mint robot,ram,slam approach,vga camera,active beacons,autonomous floor cleaning,beacon spot tracking,camera resolution,domestic robots,goal-oriented navigation,household environments,infrared spots,light distribution,low-cost indoor localization system,low-cost sensor,mobile robot localization,simultaneous localization and mapping approach,systematic navigation,detectors
Beacon,Motion planning,Computer vision,Video tracking,Artificial intelligence,Pixel,Engineering,Mobile robot navigation,Robot,Simultaneous localization and mapping,Mobile robot
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2325-0526
978-1-4673-6223-8
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jens-Steffen Gutmann165776.64
Philip Fong2543.09
Lihu Chiu340.43
Mario E. Munich4475.22