Beacon scheduling for efficient localization of a mobile robot

This paper proposes the localization scheme using ultrasonic beacons in a multi-block workspace. Indoor localization schemes using ultrasonic sensors have been widely studied due to their cheap price and high accuracy. However, ultrasonic sensors are susceptible to environmental noises from their propagation characteristics. On account of their decay phenomena when they are transmitted over a long distance, ultrasonic sensors are not suitable for application in large indoor environments. To overcome these shortages of ultrasonic sensors while emphasizing their advantages, a multi-block approach has been proposed by dividing the indoor space into several blocks with multiple beacons in each block. This approach, however, is hard to divide into several blocks when beacons are not installed in a certain pattern, and in case of having newly installed beacons, all blocks placement is reconstructed. Therefore, this paper proposes a real time localization scheme to estimate the position of mobile robot without effecting beacons placement. Beacon scheduling algorithm has been developed to select the optimal beacons according to robot position and beacon arrangement for the mobile robot navigation. The performance of the proposed localization system is verified through simulations and real experiments.