Frequency shift for position estimation in mobile robots

The ability of a robot to estimate its location in the environment is crucial for variety of tasks. Several approaches have been developed offering either low cost solutions with low accuracy or high accuracy solutions at high cost. This paper presents a displacement sensor, for mobile robots, which exploits the frequency shift caused to a signal due to the robot´s motion. This method offers a low cost solution combined with higher accuracy than other approaches of similar cost. The achieved accuracy level in combination with the relatively low power consumption and weight make this sensor a reasonable choice for mobile robotics applications.