S-Mirror: Mirroring Sensing Signals for Mobile Robots in Indoor Environments

Many mobile robots are expected to work for or interact with humans indoors in applications such as guided shopping, policing, and senior care. Mobile robots' sensors alone are insufficient in order to realize these applications, infrastructural support is needed. Existing support for mobile robots requires heavy or expensive infrastructures with limited scalability or deployment of unsightly lines or magnetic strips. This paper presents S-Mirror, a novel approach that "reflects" various ambient signals towards mobile robots, greatly extending their sensing abilities. S-Mirror forms a network of S-Mirror nodes that mainly reflect visual signals (as well as electronic and acoustic signals) to assist mobile robots. To illustrate the advantages of S-Mirror, we develop a localization approach for mobile robots that integrates S-Mirror and robots' on-board motion sensors. We implement S-Mirror and a mobile robot prototype on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Our real-world experimental validation shows that S-Mirror achieves accurate timely localization with low network bandwidth consumption as well as robustness and scalability to many mobile robots.