DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK FOR ROBOT NAVIGATION

Abstract

Global Positioning System (GPS) is often used as a main information source for robot localization and navigation. However, it cannot be used in room or in field complex environment because of the bad signal there. To solve this problem, the authors designed and implemented a specific wireless sensor network (WSN) to provide information about the environment and indicate path for robot navigation. A two-stage auto-adaptive route selecting mechanism of the WSN was proposed to facilitate data relaying in localization and the robot's navigation. A low complexity localization algorithm was used to localize both the nodes and the robot. An indirect communication method was designed to make the communication between the WSN and the robot possible. In addition, a robot navigation method was proposed based on the wireless sensor network. In this method, the robot did not need to obtain the environment information; the wireless sensor nodes collected and fused the distributed information and then indicate a path for the robot. Experiments showed that the wireless sensor network can result in obstacle avoidance navigation, and can implement the online navigation.