A position tracking experiment of mobile robot with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)

Abstract

Currently, a position tracking of mobile robot becomes increasingly important. It can be not only used to track the moving path of mobile robot for searching and identifying its current position, but also to support the operation control of mobile robot remotely. The challenge in position tracking of mobile robot is to find its location related to environment. There are several tracking techniques using x, y coordinate and heading direction to locate the position in global coordinate system. However, these techniques lack the position information in z dimension. This paper proposes the method to track the position of mobile robot by using the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that can provide the x, y and z coordination. The experiments were set in this work to verify the results of IMU signal while tracking the position of mobile robot. The results express some limitation characteristics of low-cost IMU sensor to provide accurate information. Therefore, some methodology is required to improve the accuracy of tracking position as suggested in the future work.