Study on UWB-Based Low-Cost and Precise Localization Method for Mobile Robots

Mobile robots can be used for carrying cargos and this type of mobile robots is called automated guided vehicle. The need for automating cargo management in a manufacture environment is urgent. Recent advance in big data and artificial intelligence areas has made it possible. As we known, most cargoes are transported using autonomously guided vehicles or manpower. Many autonomously guided vehicles follow paths that are predefined and usually marked by labels that can be easily found by vehicles. The use of predefined path for vehicle navigation greatly limits the deployment of autonomously guided vehicles. A few vehicles use high accuracy Light Laser Detection and Ranging for sensing and guidance. In this paper, a low-cost and precise method for mobile robots has been developed. Considering the high nonlinearity of UWB ranging data, a least square method is used to find optimal locations and a gradient decent approach is applied for fast convergence to the optimal results. The proposed method is also able to diagnose the ultra-wide band data and will throw away any data corrupted by noise. Therefore, the robustness is obtained. The robot is likely to achieve much higher accuracy when it is located in the central region of other UWB anchors, which is a known in a satellite positioning system.