Ultrasonic-sensor deployment strategies and use of smartphone sensors for mobile robot navigation in indoor environment

This paper presents deployment strategies of ultrasonic sensors and a way of using Smartphone sensors to help mobile robot navigation in indoor environments. There are critical needs for cost-effective, reliable, and fairly accurate solutions to meet the demands of indoor robotic applications. Ultrasonic sensors have been popular in detecting simple objects due to the low-cost and simplicity despite their limitations. We propose an efficient way of deployment of ultrasonic sensors for low-cost mobile robots. A Smartphone has many high performance sensors that can be utilized to navigate and localize mobile robots. The sensors include a camera, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer. We analyzed the use of orientation sensor of a Smartphone and compared its performance to a conventional approach. The comparison results were promising. The combination of the efficient way of the sensor deployment and the use of Smartphone sensors shows a possibility of developing a low-cost indoor mobile robotics platform for college education and robotics research laboratories.