One active beacon for an indoor absolute localization of a mobile vehicle

We describe in this paper an original system of localization for an autonomous mobile system. The main advantage of our system is that it only needs one active beacon for a complete localization of the mobile robot (2 Cartesian coordinates and the orientation). The receiver is made by an array of 6 large photodiodes (1 cm) fixed on the vehicle. The active beacon is a rotating laser, fixed on a wall of the manoeuvring area, with vertical line generation lens. This beacon includes an innovative laser modulation, based on a frequency variation which is a function of its absolute angular position. In the first part, we will describe the beacon and receiver functioning and explain the theoretical principle of this system. In the second part we will describe the results provided by our simulators with the aim of determining the optimum values of physical parameters and the limits of our system. In the final part we will explain our experimental system and analyse the results obtained in real conditions to suggest future interesting improvements and other utilization types.