Received signal strength based bearing-only robot navigation in a sensor network field

Abstract

This paper presents a low-complexity, novel approach to wireless sensor network (WSN) assisted autonomous mobile robot (AMR) navigation. The goal is to have an AMR navigate to a target location using only the information inherent to WSNs, i.e., topology of the WSN and received signal strength (RSS) information, while executing an efficient navigation path. Here, the AMR has neither the location information for the WSN, nor any sophisticated ranging equipment for prior mapping. Two schemes are proposed utilizing particle filtering based bearing estimation with RSS values obtained from directional antennas. Real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. In the basic node-to-node navigation scheme, the bearing-only particle filtering reduces trajectory length by 11.7% (indoors) and 15% (outdoors), when compared to using raw bearing measurements. The advanced scheme further reduces the trajectory length by 22.8% (indoors) and 19.8% (outdoors), as compared to the basic scheme. The mechanisms exploit the low-cost, low-complexity advantages of the WSNs to provide an effective method for map-less and ranging-less navigation.