Design of Bluetooth 5.1 Angle of Arrival Homing Controller for Autonomous Mobile Robot

Abstract

With the improvement of autonomous robot navigation technologies, mobile robots can now be deployed in uncertain, real-world environments. An aspect of autonomous robot navigation in such scenarios is the capability to navigate to a real-time determined (previously unknown) location anywhere in its vicinity. This is especially pertinent for indoor navigation where existing localization technologies such as GPS do not provide sufficient accuracy of target location. In this paper, a controller design is proposed which homes a mobile robot to an object of unknown location using Bluetooth 5.1 Angle of Arrival (AoA) technology. The proposed setup consists of a target object with a Bluetooth beacon and a single Bluetooth antenna array mounted on a mobile robot. The controller uses a hybrid approach to calculating and updating the estimated target position by implementing parallax and vector position calculations from AoA and RSSI Bluetooth data. Simulations with various levels of sensor noise showed convergence to accurate target positions (mean accuracy of 0.12 m or less) in both obstacle-free and obstacle-present environments. The controller can be implemented as a standalone controller by directly commanding robot motion toward the target, or it can integrate with other existing robot navigation techniques by outputting a target position.