Development of Direction Sensor using Polarized Light in the Sky for Outdoor Mobile Robot

Abstract

In nature, various kinds of annimals especially insects use polarized light in the sky for navigation. In this paper, we propose a direction sensor using polarized light in the sky for outdoor mobile robot. The proposed method has two main characteristics．First, the method uses only one polarized light sensor although to my knowledge all conventional methods use more than one, which means the method doesn't need calibration between sensors. Secondly, we rotate polarizer at constant speed above a photodiode, and approximate output values with sinusoidal function, which enables the developed sensor less affected by noise and more accurate. The comparative experiment between the developed sensor and a gyro demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Lastly, controling mobile robot by the developed sensor, robot ran 20[m] straight with error of 0.13[m] sideways, which demonstrates the applicability of the developed sensor to mobile robot.