Application of ultra-wide band localization techniques for mobile robot navigation and map building in closed environments

Nuclear power plant wastage and Landfill cleanup is still being carried out by people, who are exposed to significant health risks. In the future, as part of the ROBDEKON project, this renovation work will be performed by a semi-autonomous robots.

But in such kind of scenarios ,environment mapping remains a challenge for mobile robot which is a necessary precondition for mobile robots to execute various activities such as navigation and mission planning.

UWB technology provides a low-cost way to measure the distance with high accuracy. Due to the high ranging accuracy, UWB offers a solution for accurate positioning in feature-less environment through wireless technology. Therefore, in this thesis, a novel approach to integrate UWB localization system to a graph based slam solution for a mobile robot  to aid the navigation and mapping in an unknown environment is proposed.

It was expected that the combination of UWB and Laser scan features can lead to a robust solution to generate the map in an unknown featureless environment.

This thesis also performs several experiments to test the accuracy of the UWB modules and thereafter mapping has been performed in real enclosed places by using a turtlebot.