A dual-use visible light approach to integrated communication and localization of underwater robots with application to non-destructive nuclear reactor inspection

Visible light communication systems have gained prominence as a method for wireless underwater communications. This is because these systems are capable of long distance communications in water with high bandwidths. A requirement of visible light systems, however, is consistent line of sight to maintain a communication link. This arises from the directional nature of visible light emitters and detectors. One solution to this problem is to implement feedback control in order to “point” visible light emitters and detectors at one another. This in turn requires precise estimation of the relative locations of these two components as a feedback signal. In this work, a system is presented that uses the modulated light signal both as a medium with which to carry data and as a reference upon which to base the localization of a mobile robot. This is therefore a dual-use system, for both communication and localization. First, this paper presents the architecture of a dual-use visible light communication and localization system. The localization is carried out using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. Then, a planar version of this dual-use system is tested, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the dual-use approach.

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