Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. (ABB) Award 2014 - Amanda Prorok
MODELS AND ALGORITHMS FOR ULTRA-WIDEBAND LOCALIZATION IN SINGLE- AND MULTI-ROBOT SYSTEMS, EPFL thesis n° 5746 (2013), Thesis director: Prof. Alcherio Martinoli
"For her pioneering algorithmic and modeling contributions to the field of indoor localization based on Ultra Wide Band technology augmented with relative positioning systems as well as for her original multi-robot validation approach."
Location is a piece of information that empowers almost any type of application. In contrast to the outdoors, where global navigation satellite systems provide geo-spatial positioning, there are still millions of square meters of indoor space that are unaccounted for by location sensing technology.
In this work, we solve the indoor localization problem with a hybrid approach that consists of two complementary components: ultra-wideband localization, and collaborative localization. In pursuit of the final product, our research leads us to ask what benefits collaborative localization can provide to ultra-wideband localization — and vice versa.
To this means, we implement an evaluation system that is systematic, repeatable, and controllable: We harness mobile robots to emulate mobile targets, and track them in real-time with a highly reliable ground truth positioning system.
Numerous experiments are able to validate our combined localization strategy, and show that the performance can be significantly improved when using two complementary sensory modalities. Several insights indicate that collaboration — even if through noisy sensors — is a useful tool to reduce localization errors. In particular, we show that our collaboration strategy can provide the means to minimize the localization error, given that the collaborative design parameters are optimally tuned. Our final results show median localization errors below 10 cm.