Indoor robot localization and collaboration

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to create an indoor rescue scenario with multiple self-localizing robots that are able to collaborate for a victim search. Victims are represented by RFID tags and detecting them combined with an accurate enough location data is considered as a successful finding. This setup is created for use in a laboratory assignment at Linköping University. We consider the indoor localization problem by trying to use as few sensors as possible and implement three indoor localization methods - odometry based, passive RFID based, and our approach by fusing both sensor data with particle filter.The Results show that particle filter based localization performs the best in comparison to the two other implemented methods and satisfies the accuracy requirements stated for the scenario. The victim search problem is solved by an ant mobility (pheromone-based) approach which integrates our localization method and provides a collaborative navigation through the rescue area. The purpose of the pheromone mobility approach is to achieve a high coverage with an acceptable resource consumption.Experiments show that area is covered with approximately 30-40% overhead in traveled distance comparing to an optimal path.