Block localization methods for mobile robot tracking and navigation

Wireless information transmission tools have been common in buildings and houses. Using the information which wireless anchor nodes periodically broadcast, a mobile robot can estimate its own location in indoor environments. In this paper, we propose three block localization methods for improving mobile robot tracking and navigation performance. Unlike a conventional localization method, “the joint localization method” jointly estimates a block of successive locations of a robot imposing the constraint that the distances among the locations are exactly known for the robot. On the other hand, “the robot's location-assisted localization method” estimates the present location as if the previously estimated locations were those of anchor nodes, and “its iterative version” repeatedly updates all the locations changing the previously estimated locations. We discuss the performance of the three localization methods by computer simulation and an experiment.