Experimental Validation of a Localization System Based on a Heterogeneous Sensor Network

The experimental implementation and validation of a localization system based on a heterogeneous sensor network is described. The sensor network consists of ultrasound ranging sensors and web cameras. They are used to localize a mobile robot under sensor communication constraints. Applying a recently proposed sensor fusion algorithm that explicitly takes communication delay and cost into account, it is shown that one can accurately trade off the estimation performance by using low-quality ultrasound sensors with low processing time and low communication cost versus the use of the high-quality cameras with longer processing time and higher communication cost.