Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : Mechanical Engineering Congress,Japan
Date : September 11, 2016 - September 14, 2016
Recently, there has been a great demand for operating robots at disaster sites to prevent human damage. Many rescue robots acted and gained various achievements in hazardous condition during the Great East Japan Earthquake. However, owing to the drawback of remote robots that become uncontrollable when wired or wireless communication is ceased, their working area and condition have been limited. To solve the problem, the remote robots must determine their action and perform their work autonomously. Generally, an autonomous mobile robot estimates a self-location via GPS, however, the effective area is limited when overhead obstacles, such as large buildings or trees, are spotted. In this paper, we propose a self-location estimation method using radio wave makers and a directional reception antenna. In this method, a remote robot with the directional reception antenna measures the radio wave arrival angles by catching radio wave emitted by the makers located at known points, thus the robot position is able to be estimated by calculation. We conducted an experiment and investigated the accuracy of our method.
