Research on Integrating Low-Cost IMU and Acoustic Positioning for Indoor Robot Navigation

With the rapid advancement of robot technology, indoor positioning and navigation for robots has become a crucial area of research in intelligent robotics. This paper presents a positioning method that fuses data from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and an acoustic sensor. Additionally, it incorporates an omnidirectional travel strategy to enhance path tracking. The comparative experiment examines three path-tracking methods: pure sound tracking, IMU-integrated sound tracking, and a combination of IMU sound tracking and omnidirectional travel. The experimental results show that the tracking way that only relies on sound signals is greatly affected by environmental noise and reflection, resulting in path deviation. In contrast, sound tracking with IMU can effectively reduce the deviation of the path and improve navigation accuracy. Furthermore, after introducing the omnidirectional travel mode, the robot can intelligently choose whether to move forward or backward, optimizing the displacement offset during turns. It enhances the flexibility and efficiency of the overall path tracking. Experiments verify the effectiveness and practicability of this method in low-cost indoor positioning systems and offer new solutions for the application of smart homes, industrial automation, and unmanned distribution.