Separated Sonar Localization System for Indoor Robot Navigation

This article addresses the task of mobile robot localization for indoor navigation. In this article, we propose a novel indoor localization system based on separated sonar sensors, which can be deployed in large-scale indoor environments conveniently. In our approach, the separated sonar receivers deploy on the top ceiling, and the mobile robot equipped with the separated sonar transmitters navigates in the indoor environment. The distance measurements between the receivers and the transmitters can be obtained in real time from the control board of receivers with the infrared synchronization. The positions of the mobile robot can be computed without accumulative error. And the proposed localization method can achieve high precision in the indoor localization tasks at a very low cost. We also present a calibration method based on the simultaneous localization and mapping to initialize the positions of our system. To evaluate the feasibility and the dynamic accuracy of the proposed system, we construct our localization system in the Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform simulation platform and deploy this system in a real-world environment. Both the simulation and real-world experiments have demonstrated that our system can achieve centimeter-level accuracy. The localization accuracy of the proposed system is sufficient for robot indoor navigation.