5,424 research outputs found
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
A mosaic of eyes
Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties
Cooperative Relative Positioning of Mobile Users by Fusing IMU Inertial and UWB Ranging Information
Relative positioning between multiple mobile users is essential for many
applications, such as search and rescue in disaster areas or human social
interaction. Inertial-measurement unit (IMU) is promising to determine the
change of position over short periods of time, but it is very sensitive to
error accumulation over long term run. By equipping the mobile users with
ranging unit, e.g. ultra-wideband (UWB), it is possible to achieve accurate
relative positioning by trilateration-based approaches. As compared to vision
or laser-based sensors, the UWB does not need to be with in line-of-sight and
provides accurate distance estimation. However, UWB does not provide any
bearing information and the communication range is limited, thus UWB alone
cannot determine the user location without any ambiguity. In this paper, we
propose an approach to combine IMU inertial and UWB ranging measurement for
relative positioning between multiple mobile users without the knowledge of the
infrastructure. We incorporate the UWB and the IMU measurement into a
probabilistic-based framework, which allows to cooperatively position a group
of mobile users and recover from positioning failures. We have conducted
extensive experiments to demonstrate the benefits of incorporating IMU inertial
and UWB ranging measurements.Comment: accepted by ICRA 201
An Implementation Approach and Performance Analysis of Image Sensor Based Multilateral Indoor Localization and Navigation System
Optical camera communication (OCC) exhibits considerable importance nowadays
in various indoor camera based services such as smart home and robot-based
automation. An android smart phone camera that is mounted on a mobile robot
(MR) offers a uniform communication distance when the camera remains at the
same level that can reduce the communication error rate. Indoor mobile robot
navigation (MRN) is considered to be a promising OCC application in which the
white light emitting diodes (LEDs) and an MR camera are used as transmitters
and receiver respectively. Positioning is a key issue in MRN systems in terms
of accuracy, data rate, and distance. We propose an indoor navigation and
positioning combined algorithm and further evaluate its performance. An android
application is developed to support data acquisition from multiple simultaneous
transmitter links. Experimentally, we received data from four links which are
required to ensure a higher positioning accuracy
Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide
variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable,
measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of
estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a
beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in
the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and
potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these
design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly
searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are
optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally
expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer
that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us
to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the
joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and
settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high
localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS
RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in
fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others.
The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area
wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications.
Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT.
Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in
real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for
healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for
indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key
enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability
rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency
characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in
IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID
based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques,
algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home
systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table
Position Estimation of Robotic Mobile Nodes in Wireless Testbed using GENI
We present a low complexity experimental RF-based indoor localization system
based on the collection and processing of WiFi RSSI signals and processing
using a RSS-based multi-lateration algorithm to determine a robotic mobile
node's location. We use a real indoor wireless testbed called w-iLab.t that is
deployed in Zwijnaarde, Ghent, Belgium. One of the unique attributes of this
testbed is that it provides tools and interfaces using Global Environment for
Network Innovations (GENI) project to easily create reproducible wireless
network experiments in a controlled environment. We provide a low complexity
algorithm to estimate the location of the mobile robots in the indoor
environment. In addition, we provide a comparison between some of our collected
measurements with their corresponding location estimation and the actual robot
location. The comparison shows an accuracy between 0.65 and 5 meters.Comment: (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission
from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future
media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or
promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or
redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of
this work in other work
Recurrent Neural Networks For Accurate RSSI Indoor Localization
This paper proposes recurrent neuron networks (RNNs) for a fingerprinting
indoor localization using WiFi. Instead of locating user's position one at a
time as in the cases of conventional algorithms, our RNN solution aims at
trajectory positioning and takes into account the relation among the received
signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements in a trajectory. Furthermore, a
weighted average filter is proposed for both input RSSI data and sequential
output locations to enhance the accuracy among the temporal fluctuations of
RSSI. The results using different types of RNN including vanilla RNN, long
short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU) and bidirectional LSTM
(BiLSTM) are presented. On-site experiments demonstrate that the proposed
structure achieves an average localization error of m with of the
errors under m, which outperforms the conventional KNN algorithms and
probabilistic algorithms by approximately under the same test
environment.Comment: Received signal strength indicator (RSSI), WiFi indoor localization,
recurrent neuron network (RNN), long shortterm memory (LSTM),
fingerprint-based localizatio
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