Indoor localization of AGVs: A ground texture based solution

Thumbnail Image

Files

master_Macías_Solá_Javier_2020.pdf (16.1 MB)

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Unless otherwise stated, all rights belong to the author. You may download, display and print this publication for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.

Authors

Date

2020-12-14

Department

Major/Subject

Autonomous Systems

Mcode

ELEC3055

Degree programme

Master's Programme in ICT Innovation

Language

en

Pages

73 + 7

Series

Abstract

In the era of digitalisation of industrial processes, autonomous indoor robots are gathering increasing attention due to their maturity and the advantages they can bring into existing factories. These can boost productivity while reducing costs of relatively simple tasks such as moving goods within the stations of a warehouse. All these intralogistic operations must be performed under control and with very high precision. However, existing popular solutions require factory owners to adapt their infrastructure to fit the requirements of the AGVs. These solutions usually include the addition of artifical landmarks that the robot can detect with a dedicated sensor, as it is the case of placing lines or QR codes on the floor. Although these solutions allow the robot to globally localise itself with millimeter accuracy, they require an initial investment that is not necessarily free of issues. For instance, lines can be damaged by heavy machinery and have to be replaced recurrently. This master’s thesis aims at providing an alternative solution to indoor localisation of AGVs that does not rely in any artificial landmark that is not already available in the average factory. After analysing existing solutions for a wide variety of sensor principles as well as our requirements, we find ground texture based localisation to be a competitive candidate for this task. Our implementation adapts some ideas expressed in Identity Matching [1] and Micro-GPS [2] to create a fundamentally different localisation method using ground textures. Although the implemented solution is still far from production, this technology complies with all the business requirements. In our evaluation on a custom dataset recorded at various industrial sites, we find the computational time to be a challenging part, as well as occlusion reducing the localisation success rate considerably.

Description

Supervisor

Blech, Jan

Thesis advisor

Uttendorf, Sarah

Keywords

AGV, ground-texture, localisation, intralogistics, factory, image-processing

Other note

Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-2020122056389

Collections

[dipl] Perustieteiden korkeakoulu / SCI