Wireless Sensor-Driven Intelligent Navigation Method for Mobile Robot Applications in Construction

This paper introduces an on-going research for developing a dynamic path planning system to improve mobile robot navigation in a dynamic building construction site by integrating a set of sensor-equipped robots into a real-time indoor positioning system. In the proposed navigation system, the communication between mobile robot, an ultrawideband (UWB) position system, and a portable computer is implemented over a wireless LAN. The location data from the UWB sensor network enables accurate visual representation of the mobile robot to be displayed in a 3D CAD drawing in a real-time manner. The tested positional accuracy of the wireless configuration of the current UWB system is about 36 cm. The key advantages of the proposed approach are: (1) this approach is fully untethered self-powered wireless system with real time data delivery, and (2) the developed position tracking and robot control software modules can be easily imbedded into standard CAD programs, thus reducing computational burden on developing a new graphical user interface (GUI) for different building applications.