Research Article
Particle swarm optimization–based
minimum residual algorithm
for mobile robot localization
in indoor environment
Yunzhou Zhang
1
, Hang Hu
2
, Wenyan Fu
1
and Hao Jiang
1
Abstract
For indoor mobile robots, many localization systems based on wireless sensor network have been reported. Received
signal strength indicator is often used for distance measurement. However, the value of received signal strength indicator
always has large fluctuation because radio signal is easily influenced by environmental factors. This will bring adverse effect
on the distance measurement and deteriorate the performance of robot localization. In this article, the measured data are
dealt with weighted recursive filter, which can depress the measurement noise effectively. In the linearization procedure,
the least square method often causes additional error because it seriously relies on anchor nodes. Therefore, a minimum
residual localization algorithm based on particle swarm optimization is proposed for a mobile robot running in indoor
environment. With continuous optimization and update of particle swarm, the position that gets the best solution of
objective function can be adopted as the final estimated position. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm,
compared with traditional algorithms, can attain better localization accuracy and is closer to Cramer–Rao lower bound.
Keywords
Wireless sensor networks, mobile robot localization, data filtering, minimum residual, particle swarm optimization
Date received: 20 August 2016; accepted: 31 July 2017
Topic: Robot Sensors and Sensor Networks
Topic Editor: Henry Leung
Associate Editor: Zhenhua Li
Introduction
With wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the localization for
indoor mobile robot has become one of the most important
research issue. Different devices and methods, such as
Ultra-WideBand (UWB),
1
Bluetooth,
2
and camera,
3
have
been extensively studied and tested in this field, many of
them acquired great progress. However, most of them must
rely on special hardware and will cause high expense.
Comparatively, the localization methods based on received
signal strength indicator (RSSI), which is widely used in
WSN system, do not rely on extra hardware device. There-
fore, RSSI-based methods have become a popular topic in
these years.
4
Unfortunately, their accuracy is prone to be
influenced by environment noise. As a result, the perfor-
mance of localization algorithm needs to be improved
imminently to obtain satisfactory precision.
1
Faculty of R obot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University,
Shenyang, China
2
College of Information Science and E ngineering, Northeas tern
University, Shenyang, China
Corresponding author:
Yunzhou Zhang, Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern
University, No. 3-11, Wenhua Road, Heping District, Shenyang,
110819, China.
Email: zhangyunzhou@ise.neu.edu.cn
Interna tion al Journal of Advanced
Robotic Systems
September-October 2017: 1–9
ª The Author(s) 2017
DOI: 10.1177/1729881417729277
journals.sagepub.com/home/arx
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