Mobile robot localization in indoor environment

Abstract This paper describes an indoor mobile robot system with a self-localization capability. This capability can be used, for instance, to recover from failures during navigation. One obvious strategy in determining the self-location is to start the system from a known state and update the current state of the system in accordance with the actions effected by the robot during the course of its activity. However, sensor noise sometimes makes this strategy unreliable. A reasonable approach to overcome this difficulty is to provide feedback and verification mechanisms, for instance, via landmark features as external reference sources for the robot. The proposed system described here uses “ceiling lights” and “door number plates” for self-localization. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.