Tour guide robot using wireless based localization

Abstract

This paper details the design and implementation of a tour guide robot. This robot makes use of a ZigBee wireless network to locate itself in the tour area using a weighted centroid technique. Most popular technologies like GPS based localization do not work well in the indoor environment that the tour guide robot would operate in. The ZigBee-based solution works better in this type of environment plus the individual ZigBee nodes can be used for building monitoring applications (such as temperature and smoke detection) as well. The weighted centroid method is not the only method of localization but it is the simplest. Other competing methods like trilateration and triangulation are more prone to error as they require accurate distance measurements that an indoor environment with its myriad of reflective surfaces cannot provide. The implementation that this paper presents was able to achieve a desirable level of accuracy. The best case in the trials was a 0.61 m margin of error, and the average case was 2.38 m.