Kalman Filtering-Aided Optical Localization of Mobile Robots: System Design and Experimental Validation

Localization of mobile robots in GPS-denied envrionments (e.g., underwater) is of great importance to achieving navigation and other missions for these robots. In our prior work a concept of Simultaneous Localization And Communication (SLAC) was proposed, where the line of sight (LOS) requirement in LED-based communication is exploited to extract the relative bearing of the two communicating parties for localization purposes. The concept further involves the use of Kalman filtering for prediction of the mobile robot’s position, to reduce the overhead in establishing LOS. In this work the design of such a SLAC system is presented and experimentally evaluated in a two-dimensional setting, where a mobile robot localizes itself through wireless LED links with two stationary base nodes. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and the important role the Kalman filter plays in reducing the localization error. The effect of the distance between the base nodes on the localization performance is further studied, which bears implications in future SLAC systems where mobile base nodes can be reconfigured adaptively to maximize the localization performance.