MOBILE ROBOT LOCALIZATION IN INDOOR ENVIRONMENT

This paper describes an indoor mobile robot system with a self-localiz ation capability. This capability can be used, for instance, to recove r from failures during navigation. One obvious strategy in determining the self-location is to start the system from a known state and updat e the current state of the system in accordance with the actions effec ted by the robot during the course of its activity. However, sensor no ise sometimes makes this strategy unreliable. A reasonable approach to overcome this difficulty is to provide feedback and verification mech anisms, for instance, via landmark features as external reference sour ces for the robot. The proposed system described here uses ''ceiling l ights'' and ''door number plates'' for self-localization. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.