An Indoor Positioning System Based on Wireless Range and Angle Measurements Assisted by Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion for Service Robot Applications

Abstract

The current trend for automation is expected to a strongly growth in the area of service robotics. One of the main challenges for reliable operation of such systems is the measurement of the mobile robot pose in a given coordinate system. We present an alternative approach to indoor localization of mobile robots based on the sensor fusion of secondary radar data with an ultrasonic sensor and odometry. The main advantage of the proposed system is that it requires only minimum infrastructure and provides an absolute localization reference to increase the accuracy and reliability. Measurement campaigns in a university building, a hospital, and an office building demonstrate a very good localization performance and prove the advantage of this approach.

Keywords

• Secondary radar
• sensor fusion
• service robots
• wireless local positioning