Autonomous Indoor Navigation System for Mobile Robots

Abstract: With an increasing need for greater traffic safety, there is an increasing demand for means by which solutions to the traffic safety problem can be studied. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the feasibility of using an autonomous indoor navigation system as a component in a demonstration system for studying cooperative vehicular scenarios. Our method involves developing and evaluating such a navigation system. Our navigation system uses a pre-existing localization system based on passive RFID, odometry and a particle filter. The localization system is used to estimate the robot pose, which is used to calculate a trajectory to the goal. A control system with a feedback loop is used to control the robot actuators and to drive the robot to the goal.   The results of our evaluation tests show that the system generally fulfills the performance requirements stated for the tests. There is however some uncertainty about the consistency of its performance. Results did not indicate that this was caused by the choice of localization techniques. The conclusion is that an autonomous navigation system using the aforementioned localization techniques is plausible for use in a demonstration system. However, we suggest that the system is further tested and evaluated before it is used with applications where accuracy is prioritized.