A Low-Cost Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

Eurobot is an annual robotics competition. Teams from different countries composed of mostly students but also independent teams participate. This year s title was Robomovies, and the competition were held in Yverdon-Les-Bains in Switzerland. It is the first year UiO participated in the competition, and all parts of the robot needed to be developed. The game table was also build according to the measures and specifications listed in the rules. This has been designed so that it easily can be modified to fit future year s tasks. The main goal of this thesis is to research technologies and establish the foundation for coming participants in the Eurobot competition from University of Oslo (UiO). This thesis focus on the navigation and position system of the robot and the sensor system. A low cost beacon based positioning system using infrared codes and a rotating tower has been developed and tested. A Kalman filter was used to combine the odometry and the beacon system for a better position estimate. However, the beacon system did not work sufficiently when the robot was moving and rotating. All the code for the navigation and sensor part have been written in C++. A silicone wheel was designed in order to improve the grip ensuring that no wheelspin would occur making the position based on the odometry quite reliable. In order to avoid collision, proximity sensors were mounted both on the front and the back of the robot. A personal Computer (PC) was used to control the robot. For the communication between all the different systems the message library Zero Message Queue (ZMQ) has been used. ZMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library. It is one of the easiest message library to use, as well as being one of the fastest. And worked well in this project.