October 2018 - December 2020

ROSINPS

ROS INDUSTRIAL INDOOR POSITIONING SYSTEM

Support Program: European Union Framework Program

Satellite based Global Positioning Systems are commonly used in outdoor applications. However, they are not working indoor since the satellites’ signals cannot penetrate into the buildings.

Indoor positioning is the basic need of technologies required for Industry 4.0. Some examples of these technologies are autonomy of unmanned mobile robots, personnel and asset tracking, personnel navigation and location-based services. With the realization of technologies, applications like autonomous mobile robots, monitoring efficiency (OEE, KPI, reliability) of equipments, dynamic routing for mobile robots, real time stock tracking, location-based emergency detection can be developed in order to increase the productivity.

There is no absolute indoor positioning ROS package in the current ROS middleware. Also there is a gap in ROS industrial roadmap about mobile robots (AGV etc.) considering Industry 4.0 objectives. This FTP aims to develop necessary algorithms and a ROS package for absolute indoor positioning in order to fill this gap. The algorithms and the ROS package can be used with multilateration TDOA measurements.