RRDV: Robots Rendez-Vous Detection Using Time-Synchronized Ultrasonic Sensors

In this paper we propose RRDV, a system for robot-to-robot encounter detection. We use low-cost ultrasound sensor and time-synchronized mobile robots to detect when two robots are facing one another. Ultrasound ranging is triggered by the control application on a computer. The application sends a ranging command to the gateway, which broadcasts it to the mobile robots over the radio. Robots synchronize their ultrasound trigger pin with the start of frame event and send back the notifications with measured distances using Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA). The system then finds the encounters by searching for timestamps where the difference in distance reported by two robots is less then 1 cm. In the current implementation, the system achieves a 20 Hz distance measurement update rate. RRDV is validated experimentally using 5 mobile robots which are controlled by the users and moved randomly. We implemented a Computer Vision (CV) algorithm for tracking mobile robots as they move and detect when they are facing one another. The CV algorithm is used as the ground truth for the experimental evaluation. The results show 96.7% successfully detected robot encounters, when the duration of the encounter is more than 5 s.