A high precision visual localization sensor and its working methodology for an indoor mobile robot

Abstract

To overcome the shortcomings of existing robot localization sensors, such as low accuracy and poor robustness, a high precision visual localization system based on infrared-reflective artificial markers is designed and illustrated in detail in this paper. First, the hardware system of the localization sensor is developed. Secondly, we design a novel kind of infrared-reflective artificial marker whose characteristics can be extracted by the acquisition and processing of the infrared image. In addition, a confidence calculation method for marker identification is proposed to obtain the probabilistic localization results. Finally, the autonomous localization of the robot is achieved by calculating the relative pose relation between the robot and the artificial marker based on the perspective-3-point (P3P) visual localization algorithm. Numerous experiments and practical applications show that the designed localization sensor system is immune to the interferences of the illumination and observation angle changes. The precision of the sensor is ±1.94 cm for position localization and ±1.64◦ for angle localization. Therefore, it satisfies perfectly the requirements of localization precision for an indoor mobile robot.