Robot localization sensor for development of wireless location sensing network

The localization is one of the most important issues for mobile robot. We describe a novel localization sensor suite for the development of a wireless location sensing network. The sensor suite comprises wirelessly controlled infrared landmarks and an image sensor which detects the pixel positions of infrared sources. The proposed sensor suite can operate irrespective of the illumination condition in the indoor environment. We describe the operating principles of the developed sensor suite and report the performance for mobile robot localization and navigation. The advantage of the developed sensor suite lies in its robustness and low cost to obtain localization information as well as simplicity of deployment to build a robot location sensing network. Experimental results show that the developed sensor suite outperforms the state-of-the-art localization sensor.