Indoor localization and navigation for a mobile robot equipped with rotating ultrasonic sensors using a smartphone as the robot's brain

Abstract

Identifying the exact current location of a robot is a fundamental prerequisite for successful robot navigation. To precisely localize a robot, one popular way is to use particle filters that estimate the posterior probabilistic density of a robot's state space. But this Bayesian recursion approach is computationally expensive. Most microcontrollers in a small mobile robot cannot afford it. We propose to use a smartphone as a robot's brain in which heavy-duty computations take place whereas an embedded microcontroller on the robot processes rudimentary sensors such as ultrasonic and touch sensors. In our design, a smarphone is wirelessly connected to a robot via Bluetooth by which distance measurements from the robot are sent to the smartphone. Then the smartphone takes responsible for computationally expensive operations like executing the particle filter algorithm. Also we propose to use rotating ultrasonic sensors to reduce the number of sensors needed as well as time of distant measurements. In this paper, we designed a mobile robot and its control architecture to demonstrate that the robot can navigate indoor environment while avoiding obstacles and localize its current position. Several experiments were conducted to show feasibility of the rotating sensors and a smartphone brain for a mobile robot.