Distributed System for Objects Localization in the Working Area of a Modular Reconfigurable Mobile Robot

The paper proposes a novel approach to the objects localization in the working area of a modular reconfigurable robot (MRR), which implies the installation of stationary monitoring points (SMP), consisting of detachable robot’s modules and in- stalled by robot itself. This approach is based on the architecture of the MRR control system previously proposed by the authors and a new method for comparing information about the speed and position obtained from various sensors. The key steps of the approach are following. Upon arriving in the target area, the MRR places SMPs, which consist of a power source, a computing device, a wireless transceiver and a sensor, detached from the robot. Then SMPs monitor the working area using different types of sensors (cameras, rangefinders, etc.), perform segmentation of the measured data and transfer this information to the robot. Further a sensor fusion is performed using a novel object tracking method, which makes it possible to localize target objects even in those cases when they are not visible by some of the SMPs. One of the key advantages of the new approach is a possibility of implementation in the distributed architecture of a MRR. The simulation results show that proposed method has Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) metric of 86 %, which is higher than the most of its analogues, while the estimated dynamic object localization error in a 8x7 m working area using 2 cameras and 1 rangefinder does not exceed 10 cm.