An Experimental Study of a Cooperative Positioning System

  • Authors:

  • Ryo Kurazume;Shigeo Hirose

  • Affiliations:

  • Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, Oo-okayama Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan. kurazume@mes.titech.ac.jp;Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, Oo-okayama Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Robots
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Several position identification methods are beingused for mobile robots. Dead reckoning is a popular method but dueto the error accumulation from wheel slippage, its reliability is lowfor measurement of long distances especially on uneven surfaces.Another popular method is the landmark method, which estimatescurrent position relative to known landmarks, but the landmarkmethod's limitation is that it cannot be used in an unchartedenvironment. Thus, this paper proposes a new method called“Cooperative Positioning System (CPS)” that is able to overcomethese shortcomings. The main concept of CPS is to divide the robotsinto two groups, A and B where group A remains stationary and acts asa landmark while group B moves and then group B stops and acts as alandmark for group A. This process is repeated until the targetposition is reached. Compared with dead reckoning, CPS has a farlower accumulation of positioning errors, and can also work in threedimensions. Furthermore, CPS employs inherent landmarks andtherefore can be used in uncharted environments unlike the landmarkmethod. In this paper, we introduce the basic concept of CPS and itspositioning principle. Next, we outline a second prototype CPSmachine model (CPS-II) and discuss the method of position estimationusing the variance of positioning error and weighted least squaresmethod. Position identification experiments using the CPS-II modelgive a positioning accuracy of 0.12% for position and 0.32 degreefor attitude after the robots traveled a distance of 21.5 m.