INDOOR LOCALIZATION OF AN OMNI-DIRECTIONAL WHEELED MOBILE ROBOT

Abstract

This paper presents a localization system developed for estimating the pose, i.e., position and orientation, of an omni-directional wheeled mobile robot operating in indoor structured environments. The developed system uses a combination of relative and absolute localization methods for pose estimation. Odometry serves as the relative localization method providing pose estimates through the integration of measurements obtained from shaft encoders on the robot’s drive motors. Absolute localization is achieved with a novel GPS-like system that performs localization of active beacons mounted on the mobile robot based on distance measurements to receivers fixed at known positions in the robot’s indoor workspace. A simple data fusion algorithm is used in the localization system to combine the pose estimates from the two localization methods and achieve improved performance. Experimental results demonstrating the performance of the developed system at localizing the omni-directional robot in an indoor environment are presented.