Robot Localization in the Magnetic Unstable Environment

Abstract

In the recent years we have developed a library called robo-guide, designed for our mobile robots to assist visitors with guidance in the building of our department. In the process of development we faced the problem of proper robot localization, what was caused by magnetic disturbances in the building. Using robots equipped with magnetic compass for navigating on the map, the proper estimation of position using, for example, histogram or particle filtering is substantially difficult, because expected readings from radar can be shifted. To overcome this problem we used the map of magnetic anomalies and the epsilon granules to estimate proper north direction, which let us to minimize the error between expected and actual direction. We performed real life experiments with our robots. The results of the experiments show satisfying effectiveness of our approach.