Robot vision ultra-wideband wireless sensor in non-cooperative industrial environments

Abstract

In this article, the ultra-wideband technology for localization and tracking of the robot gripper (behind the obstacles) in industrial environments is presented. We explore the possibilities of ultra-wideband radar sensor network employing the centralized data fusion method that can significantly improve tracking capabilities in a complex environment. In this article, we present ultra-wideband radar sensor network hardware demonstrator that uses a new wireless ultra-wideband sensor with an embedded controller to detect and track online or off-line movement of the robot gripper. This sensor uses M-sequence ultra-wideband radars front-end and low-cost powerful processors on a system on chip with the advanced RISC machines (ARM) architecture as a main signal processing block. The ARM-based single board computer ODROID-XU4 platform used in our ultra-wideband sensor can provide processing power for the preprocessing of received raw radar signals, algorithms for detection and estimation of target’s coordinates, and finally, compression of data sent to the data fusion center. Data streams of compressed target coordinates are sent from each sensor node to the data fusion center in the central node using standard the wireless local area network (WLAN) interface that is the feature of the ODROID-XU4 platform. The article contains experimental results from measurements where sensors and antennas are located behind the wall or opaque material. Experimental testing confirmed capability of real-time performance of developed ultra-wideband radar sensor network hardware and acceptable precision of software. The introduced modular architecture of ultra-wideband radar sensor network can be used for fast development and testing of new real-time localization and tracking applications in industrial environments.