The localization of a mobile robot using a pseudolite ultrasonic system and a dead reckoning integrated system

In this paper, an integration system is proposed to improve the positioning performance of a mobile robot by fusing a Pseudolite Ultrasonic System (PUS), an absolute position measurement system using direct ultrasonic waves, with a Dead Reckoning (DR) odometer. As an integration algorithm of the absolute position measurement system and DR, two methods are proposed. In the loosely coupled method, the PUS and the DR calculate the position independently and a Kalman filter estimates the position using position information from the PUS and the DR. In the tightly coupled method, the PUS provides the distance between the ultrasonic transmitters and receivers without calculating the position directly and the DR provides the translational and rotational displacement of the mobile robot. The Kalman filter then estimates the position using information from the PUS and the DR. In addition, to improve the positioning performance in case the line-of-sight (LOS) between the ultrasonic transmitter and receiver is blocked due to obstacles, a positioning failure detection algorithm and reckoning methods are proposed. The positioning performances of the proposed PUS/DR integrated systems and the validity of the positioning failure detection algorithm are verified and evaluated by experiments.