• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.17 no.5
• /
• pp.1339-1355
• /
• 2023

Localization is a hot research spot for many areas, especially in the mobile robot field. Due to the weak signal of the global positioning system (GPS), the alternative schemes in an indoor environment include wireless signal transmitting and receiving solutions, laser rangefinder to build a map followed by a re-localization stage and visual positioning methods, etc. Among all wireless signal positioning techniques, Wi-Fi is the most common one. Wi-Fi access points are installed in most indoor areas of human activities, and smart devices equipped with Wi-Fi modules can be seen everywhere. However, the localization of a mobile robot using a Wi-Fi scheme usually lacks orientation information. Besides, the distance error is large because of indoor signal interference. Another research direction that mainly refers to laser sensors is to actively detect the environment and achieve positioning. An occupancy grid map is built by using the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method when the mobile robot enters the indoor environment for the first time. When the robot enters the environment again, it can localize itself according to the known map. Nevertheless, this scheme only works effectively based on the prerequisite that those areas have salient geometrical features. If the areas have similar scanning structures, such as a long corridor or similar rooms, the traditional methods always fail. To address the weakness of the above two methods, this work proposes a coarse-to-fine paradigm and an improved localization algorithm that utilizes Wi-Fi to assist the robot localization in a geometrically similar environment. Firstly, a grid map is built by using laser SLAM. Secondly, a fingerprint database is built in the offline phase. Then, the RSSI values are achieved in the localization stage to get a coarse localization. Finally, an improved particle filter method based on the Wi-Fi signal values is proposed to realize a fine localization. Experimental results show that our approach is effective and robust for both global localization and the kidnapped robot problem. The localization success rate reaches 97.33%, while the traditional method always fails.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.12 no.5
• /
• pp.450-456
• /
• 2006

Monte Carlo localization is known to be one of the most reliable methods for pose estimation of a mobile robot. Although MCL is capable of estimating the robot pose even for a completely unknown initial pose in the known environment, it takes considerable time to give an initial pose estimate because the number of random samples is usually very large especially for a large-scale environment. For practical implementation of MCL, therefore, a reduction in sample size is desirable. This paper presents a novel approach to reducing the number of samples used in the particle filter for efficient implementation of MCL. To this end, the topological information generated through the thinning technique, which is commonly used in image processing, is employed. The global topological map is first created from the given grid map for the environment. The robot then scans the local environment using a laser rangefinder and generates a local topological map. The robot then navigates only on this local topological edge, which is likely to be similar to the one obtained off-line from the given grid map. Random samples are drawn near the topological edge instead of being taken with uniform distribution all over the environment, since the robot traverses along the edge. Experimental results using the proposed method show that the number of samples can be reduced considerably, and the time required for robot pose estimation can also be substantially decreased without adverse effects on the performance of MCL.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.66-76
• /
• 2016

Determination of type of a vehicle is being used in various areas such as collecting tolls, collecting statistical traffic data and traffic prognosis. Because most of the vehicle type classification systems depend on vehicle length indirectly or directly, highly reliable automatic vehicle length measurement system is crucial for them. This study makes use of a pencil beam laser rangemeter and devises a mechanical device which rotates the laser rangemeter. The implemented system measures the range between a point and the laser rangemeter then indicates it as a spherical coordinate. We obtain several silhouettes of cross section of the vehicle, the rate of change of the silhouettes, signs of the rates then squares the rates to apply cell averaging constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) technique to find out where the border is between the vehicle and the background. Using the border and trigonometry, we calculated the length of the vehicle and confirmed that the calculated vehicle length is about 94% of actual length.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2005.06a
• /
• pp.901-905
• /
• 2005

Monte Carlo localization is known to be one of the most reliable methods for pose estimation of a mobile robot. Much research has been done to improve performance of MCL so far. Although MCL is capable of estimating the robot pose even for a completely unknown initial pose in the known environment, it takes considerable time to give an initial estimate because the number of random samples is usually very large especially for a large-scale environment. For practical implementation of the MCL, therefore, a reduction in sample size is desirable. This paper presents a novel approach to reducing the number of samples used in the particle filter for efficient implementation of MCL. To this end, the topological information generated off- line using a thinning method, which is commonly used in image processing, is employed. The topological map is first created from the given grid map for the environment. The robot scans the local environment using a laser rangefinder and generates a local topological map. The robot then navigates only on this local topological edge, which is likely to be the same as the one obtained off- line from the given grid map. Random samples are drawn near the off-line topological edge instead of being taken with uniform distribution, since the robot traverses along the edge. In this way, the sample size required for MCL can be drastically reduced, thus leading to reduced initial operation time. Experimental results using the proposed method show that the number of samples can be reduced considerably, and the time required for robot pose estimation can also be substantially decreased.