Development of a laser-based localization system in an outdoor setting: Design and performance evaluation of transmitter and receiver component

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been widely used as guidance for autonomous vehicles and robots, especially in outdoor environments. For such application a high accuracy of GPS is required (e.g. using a Real-Time Kinematics Differential GPS). however, it is costly. This paper discuss about development of a laser-based localization system in outdoor setting which works based on triangulation as an alternative of positioning system as a guidance of agricultural machinery operation in a specified field operation such as fertilizer application or chemical sprayer operation. More specific this paper discuss about design and performance analysis of laser transmitter and receiver component of the proposed system. The main challenges in designing those components is that the system should be capable of dealing with influencing factors exist in outdoor environment, especially ambient light. Here, modulation technique applied to the transmitter combined with high pass filter applied to the receiver is used to address that issue. The experiment results showed that using transmitter with laser modulated at 2.7 kHz and receiver with 1.5 kHz cut-off high pass filter worked best on 50% duty cycle. The developed transmitter-receiver system was capable of reaching up to 200 m distance and worked well on a various ambient light conditions. This result suggested that the developed prototype can be used to further develop the proposed laser based localization system.