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Research and Implementation of Indoor Location for Home Service

Robot
To cite this article: Haifei Si et al 2020 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 711 012035

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

Research and Implementation of Indoor Location for Home

Service Robot

Haifei Si1,2*, Xingliu Hu1* , Li Xu1

1
College of Intelligent Science and Control Engineering, Jinling Institute of
Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 211169, China
2
College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang,
150001, China
*
Corresponding author’s e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. At present, the trend of population aging in the world is becoming more and more
serious. Many countries have implemented many measures to solve this problem. Various
high-tech products to help the elderly and disabled have also entered the lives of the elderly. In
order to ensure the safety of the elderly or disabled at home, this paper designs a room using
SLAM algorithm of lidar sensor under ROS (Robot Operating System) environment.Wheeled
home service robots with internal positioning, mapping and multi-point continuous navigation
can collect and analyze environmental data such as temperature, humidity, smoke and
rainwater outside the windows and broadcast them by voice while navigation.After many
debugging, this design has realized the function of indoor autonomous navigation, and timely
alarm and control of abnormal environmental data in the home.

1. Introduction
According to the definition of the International Federation of Robots, service robots are robots that can
help people realize semi-autonomous or fully autonomous operation of equipment other than
production, processing and manufacturing[1]. Service robots can be classified as home service robots
and special service robots [2].
The development of home service robot technology can alleviate the old-age problem caused by the
aging population, reduce the pressure of young people’s life, and promote social and economic
development[3]. Therefore, the research of home service robots will be of great significance to many
aspects of society. At present, most countries in the world are developing robots, of which about 25
countries are involved in the research and development of service-oriented robots. In the field of
service robots, Japan, Korea, the United States and Germany are at the forefront of the world.
Compared with Japan, the United States and other countries, the research and development of service
robots in China started late, but developed rapidly. Home robot localization is a hot issue in the field
of mobile robots research, and it is the premise and key of autonomous intelligence for robots to
achieve various complex tasks. Sensor positioning is a common method of positioning[4]. Sensors for
positioning include ranging sensors (such as sonar and laser sensors) and visual sensors. Vision is the
most direct means for human to perceive the noisy environment. Therefore, the development of visual
perception ability for robot positioning is conducive to improving its intelligence. Most of the existing
localization algorithms rely on sensors carried by mobile robots. In the process of localization, the
environment of the robot is unpredictable, such as the environmental changes caused by human

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

movement and furniture movement. Therefore, it is easy to mismatch and fail to locate only according
to the local perception information of the robot body. In order to achieve effective positioning, the
robot needs to carry a large number of sensors, which not only increases the load of the robot, but also
increases the computational burden of the robot processor. Through the study of the above problems,
the SLAM algorithm based on lidar sensor is proposed to realize indoor positioning of service robot.

2. Signal Acquisition of Home Service Robot

2.1. Architecture Design of Home Service Robot

The home service robot is composed of two parts: the moving control system, the environment
acquisition and broadcasting system [5]. In the moving control system, the Ubuntu operating system
on the raspberry motherboard is used as the software carrier, and the combination of SLAM algorithm
in ROS and lidar sensor is used to map and navigate indoors. The structure block diagram is shown in
figure 1. The part of environment collection and broadcasting is also divided into two parts: host and
slave. Host refers to the part installed in the body of the robot. Random robot moves while slave is
fixed in a fixed position at home. The main part includes power supply, motor and motor drive,
infrared sensor, ultrasonic, voice broadcasting, camera image transmission, controller and Zigbee
wireless communication module. The slave consists of temperature and humidity, smoke and rain
sensor module, control module, Zigbee communication module and relay output module.

Figure 1. Hardware system block diagram of robot traveling.

2.2. Manual Indoor Mapping

Before the home service robot works properly, indoor construction map needs to be done manually.
The meaning of the map is to scan the contour map of the room and let the robot have specific
reference when it moves on its own. Then it can set coordinates for the robot to navigate by itself and
take video and grab objects in real time. Users can also monitor the video at home remotely by mobile
App. Home environment data collected by sensors are sent to the host through Zigbee network. The
host analyses the data and broadcasts it. When a certain data value exceeds its normal threshold, the
host sends the output instructions to the slave and the slave relay acts.The schematic diagram of the
environment acquisition and broadcasting part is shown in figure 2.

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

Temperature and
humidity etc.

Zigbee
MCU MCU
network

Voice
Relay
Announcements
Figure 2. Block diagram of environmental acquisition system.
The basic RPLIDARA1 two-dimensional lidar developed by Shanghai SLAMTEC Company is
selected as the lidar sensor.This object is shown in figure 3.Through high-speed rotation, scanning is
carried out on a two-dimensional plane with a radius of 360 degrees and a radius of 6m at the center of
rotation. Map information of plane point clouds in space is generated by software.This information is
often used in map building, robot positioning and navigation applications.

Figure 3. RPLIDAR A1 physical map.

RPLIDARA1 uses laser triangulation ranging technology and SLAMTEC developed high-speed
visual acquisition and processing mechanism, which can achieve more than 2000 ranging actions per
second [6]. In each ranging process, the lidar transmits modulated infrared laser signal, and the lidar
visual acquisition system receives after the laser signal irradiates the target object [7-9]. Through real-
time calculation of the DSP processor embedded in the lidar, the distance between the reflected target
and the lidar and the current angle information are output from the communication interface. The
schematic diagram of its working principle is shown in figure 4.

Figure 4. Schematic diagram of RPLIDAR A1 working principle.

RPLIDARA1 has its own speed detection and adaptive system. Radar scanning frequency will be
automatically adjusted according to the actual speed of the motor. It does not need to provide a
complex power supply system for RPLIDARA1. The core of RPLIDARA1 distance measurement is to

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

rotate clockwise under the drive of motor mechanism, and to realize scanning and ranging in 360
degree omni-directional environment.

2.3. SLAM algorithm

SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping or simultaneous positioning and mapping) is a
concept that the robot wants to determine its position and posture relative to the surrounding objects
by continuously scanning and comparing the features of the objects around it.Starting from the
unknown position in unknown environment, the feature contours of objects obtained by moving along
with themselves are compared and combined to realize location and mapping [10-11]. At present, the
two kinds of sensors that achieve better results of SLAM algorithm are lidar and camera. This topic
chooses lidar. When the distance between the robot and the object is within the effective range of lidar,
the mapping effect is the best. The map contour shows the phenomenon of a straight line without a
dotted line. The effect is shown in figure 5.

Figure 5. Drawing effect map.

3. Software Design of Home Service Robot

3.1. ROS System Framework

The main controller of the robot, remote connection tools and PC (Ubuntu system) are connected to
the same WIFI. Node managers and keyboard debugging, SLAM and path planning nodes are
established on the PC, and vision, lidar, mileage and basic controller nodes are created on the main
controller of the mobile robot.After registering all nodes in the node manager and being managed by
the manager, TCP/IP communication can be carried out through the end-to-end topology of the same
network to achieve effective communication between nodes on different hosts. Finally, SLAM and
path planning can be implemented on PC using the three-dimensional visualization tool RVIZ.The
structure of the frame node of ROS system is shown in figure 6.

Figure 6. ROS System Framework Diagram.

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

3.2. Programming of Position Control

Before navigating, you need to put the map you built before into the maps folder and modify the map
name in the map calling program.After the modification is completed, enter roslaunch
pibot_navigation view_nav.launch in the terminal of the virtual machine to view the map. This
command will open the rviz tool. By setting the 2D Nav Goal in rviz, the single navigation of the
robot can be realized. The interface is shown in figure 7. The black border is the outline of the built
room map, and the red border is the outline of the room that the robot scans in real time.

Figure 7. rviz navigation interface.

As ROS node, the position control module firstly analyses the linear velocity and angular velocity
transmitted by the basic controller node, and obtains the linear velocity, angular velocity and
displacement required by the left and right wheels of the robot.Then, by calculating the actual motion
speed, angular velocity and the displacement of the left and right wheels of the robot measured by the
encoder, the errors of the motion speed and direction of the robot are obtained.The PID algorithm is
used to precisely control the speed of the left and right wheel motors, so that the robot can move
according to the path planning trajectory.Finally, the attitude parameters of the robot, such as linear
velocity, angular velocity and displacement, are released to the mileage node [12-14].The flow chart
of the program is shown in figure 8.

Figure 8. Flow chart of position control program.

This design uses SLAM algorithm of lidar sensor under ROS environment to produce a wheeled
home service robot which can locate, map and navigate continuously in the indoor environment. While
navigating, it can collect and analyze the environmental data such as temperature and humidity, smoke

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

and rainwater outside the window, and broadcast them by voice.After many debugging, this design has
realized the function of indoor autonomous navigation, and timely alarm and control of abnormal
environmental data in the home.

4. Conclusion
This paper chooses the SLAM algorithm of lidar as the indoor positioning method.The positioning,
mapping and navigation of the robot in the indoor environment are realized. The indoor positioning
function of the robot is realized by lidar sensor and motor encoder, and the indoor map is constructed
by RVIZ and mapping function package in ROS. Then the initial and target coordinates of the robot
are set to realize autonomous navigation through lidar and coder.
In this paper, the robot has four layers. The chassis is made of iron sheets with a diameter of 35 cm
and a thickness of 2 mm, so as to ensure that the whole robot can bear enough load. The larger weight
objects such as batteries and motors are installed on the bottom to improve the stability of the vehicle.
The second layer is equipped with voltage-reducing power supply module, motor drive module and
sensor module, the third layer is equipped with control board, communication module and camera
module, and the top layer is equipped with a three-axis manipulator. Each layer is connected by four
10 cm long connecting pillars. The robot effect is shown in figure 9. The physical objects produced are
shown in figure 10 and figure 11.

Figure 9. Robot rendering.

Figure 10. Robot Level 3 and Top Robot Arm.

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2019 International Conference on Optoelectronic Science and Materials IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 711 (2020) 012035 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/711/1/012035

Figure 11. Robot Bottom and Second Layer.

Nowadays, the satellite positioning technology for outdoor positioning is mature, but the
convenient positioning method for indoor consumption level has not been truly popular.For example,
people use the most frequently mobile phones, mobile phones can easily locate their location
accurately outdoors, but when mobile phones enter a more closed indoor, their positioning function
almost fails or deviates greatly.This problem is not only the difficulty in the design of this subject, but
also the difficulty that science and technology need to break through. Due to the problems of indoor
positioning, motion accuracy and product cost, it is still difficult for most of the service robots to
really enter the family and integrate into the family.So I hope that in the future, the development of
robots and science and technology will promote each other and realize the civilianization of home
service robots as soon as possible.

Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the Jiangsu Province’s Natural Science Foundation under Grant
BK20171114, Youth Academic Leader in Qinglan Project of Jiangsu University in 2017, A joint
prospective industry-University-Research Collaboration project of Jiangsu Province under Grant
BY2016012-02, National Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province
under Grant 15KJB520010, Ministry of Education’s Cooperative Education Project under Grant
201701056001,201801112066, Jinling Institute of Technology’s Education Reform Project under
Grant 2017JYJG03, Jinling Institute of Technology Talent Introduction Project under Grant Jit-rcyj-
201604.

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