Robot Localization and Navigation Using Visible Light Positioning and SLAM Fusion

Visible light positioning (VLP) is a promising technology since it can provide high accuracy indoor localization based on the existing lighting infrastructure. However, existing approaches often require dense LED distributions and persistent line-of-sight (LOS) between transmitter and receiver. What's more, sensors are imperfect, and their measurements are prone to errors. Through multi sensors fusion, we can compensate the deficiencies of stand-alone sensors and provide more reliable pose estimations. In this work, we propose a loosely-coupled multi-sensor fusion method based on VLP and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), using light detection and ranging (LiDAR), odometry, and rolling shutter camera. Our multi-sensor localizer can provide accurate and robust robot localization and navigation in LED shortage/outage situations. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can provide an average accuracy of 2.5 cm with around 42 ms average positioning latency.