Hazardous Area Navigation with Temporary Beacons

A new area expansion algorithm for the localization scheme, using temporary beacons, is proposed in this paper. The effective area of the active beacons is limited by the strength of the ultrasonic signals in a noisy environment. When a mobile robot needs to move into a hazardous area or into an unstructured environment where the beacons with pre-specified position information are not available, the localization may solely rely on dead reckoning sensors such as encoders. To overcome the error accumulation by using dead-reckoning, a new scheme is developed, in this paper, in which the mobile robot carries a few temporary beacons which do not have any pre-stored position information. When the mobile robot encounters a dangerous or unstructured environment, it utilizes the temporary beacons to localize itself. An auto-calibration algorithm has been developed to provide the position information to the temporary beacons before they are used for the localization. With these temporary beacons and the auto-calibration algorithm, mobile robots can safely pass unstructured areas. The effectiveness of the temporary beacons and auto-calibration algorithm is verified through real experiments of mobile robot navigation.