Positioning system for indoor vehicle using odometry, ultrasonic sensor and environment map: Ultrasonic sensor simulator for landmark identification

This paper proposes a positioning system for indoor vehicles, which uses an odometry, ultrasonic sensors and an environment map. The system cancels the accumulating error in odometry using the range data to the wall or edge landmarks measured by ultrasonic sensor. This method requires only a simple hardware, however, it is necessary to find the correspondence between the real sensor datum and a landmark in the environment map. At first this paper describes the outline of the previous works on indoor positioning systems, and then proposes a new structure of a practical positioning system. This structure uses an ultrasonic sensor simulator to solve this correspondence problem. Finally this paper shows our experimental system on our mobile robot, and results, which show the effectiveness of this method.