The Range Beacon Placement Problem for Robot Navigation

Instrumentation of an environment with sensors can provide an effective and scalable localization solution for robots. Where GPS is not available, beacons that provide position estimates to a robot must be placed effectively in order to maximize a robots navigation accuracy and robustness. Sonar range-based beacons are reasonable candidates for low cost position estimate sensors. In this paper we explore heuristics derived from computational geometry to estimate the effectiveness of sonar beacon deployments given a predefined mobile robot path. Results from numerical simulations and experimentation demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.