Co-Design of a Robot Controller Board and Indoor Positioning System for IoT-Enabled Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective indoor robot navigation system combining a custom controller board with an indoor positioning system using a webcam, achieving high precision and IoT connectivity.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel, low-cost robot controller board with IoT capabilities and a webcam-based indoor positioning system for precise robot navigation.

Findings

Navigation error ≤ 0.125 meters

System is over 100 times cheaper than commercial MOCAP systems

Effective IoT communication for robot control

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a cost-effective yet precise indoor robot navigation system composed of a custom robot controller board and an indoor positioning system. First, the proposed robot controller board has been specially designed for emerging IoT-based robot applications and is capable of driving two 6-Amp motor channels. The controller board also embeds an on-board micro-controller with WIFI connectivity, enabling robot-to-server communications for IoT applications. Then, working together with the robot controller board, the proposed positioning system detects the robot's location using a down-looking webcam and uses the robot's position on the webcam images to estimate the real-world position of the robot in the environment. The positioning system can then send commands via WIFI to the robot in order to steer it to any arbitrary location in the environment. Our experiments show that the proposed system reaches a navigation error smaller or equal to 0.125 meters while being more than two orders of magnitude more cost-effective compared to off-the-shelve motion capture (MOCAP) positioning systems.