Experimental validation of a localization system based on a heterogeneous sensor network

Abstract

Abstract — The experimental implementation and validation of a localization system based on a heterogeneous sensor network is described. The sensor network consists of ultrasound ranging sensors and web cameras. They are used to localize a mobile robot under sensor communication constraints. Applying a recently proposed sensor fusion algorithm that explicitly takes communication delay and cost into account, it is shown that one can accurately trade off the estimation performance by using low-quality ultrasound sensors with low processing time and low communication cost versus the use of the high-quality cameras with longer processing time and higher communication cost. It is shown that a periodic schedule of the sensors is suitable in many cases. The experimental setup is discussed in detail and experimental results are presented. I.