UWB Positioning For Autonomous Swarm Robots

In recent years,swarm robots are becoming a hot research field because of their distributed and autonomous decision-making characteristics,which help to solve problems that cannot be solved by centralized controlled multi-robot systems.As an important part of the decisionmaking of swarm robots,location information has a non-negligible influence on its ability to perform predetermined tasks or algorithms.However,most of the existing robot positioning technologies require the assistance of servers or known anchor nodes for positioning,which is not suitable for autonomous swarm robot application scenarios.For this point,based on UWB technology,this paper designs and implements a relative positioning method that does not rely on servers or known anchor nodes,which is suitable for autonomous swarm robots.This method is based on UWB communication technology,integrates DS-TWR and RSSI methods to measure the distance between robots,and uses PDOA method to obtain the angle of signal arrival,and integrates the distance and angle measurement results to obtain the relative position of the target.In addition,the method is based on UWB communication,and can also exchange information between robots while positioning,which makes the integration of positioning and communication possible.In order to realize this method,the main work of this paper includes the following points:(1)Aiming at the needs of the swarm-robot system for positioning technology,based on the analysis of the existing positioning technology,a relative positioning method based on UWB technology is proposed,and the overall scheme design of the system architecture and hardware and software structure is made.(2)A ranging method that combines DS-TWR and RSSI methods is proposed,and the principle of PDOA method to measure angle of arrival is introduced.Combining the above two methods,a comprehensive positioning method is proposed,which can obtain the relative position of the target.(3)Completed the hardware design of the positioning system in the swarm robot experiment platform,including hardware selection and circuit design,mainly including UWB communication module,PDOA module,Wi-Fi communication module,IMU module,etc.(4)Completed the software design of the positioning system in the swarm robot experimental platform,including the UWB communication and ranging functions,the PDOAbased angle measurement function,the relative positioning function,and the Wi-Fi communication function.This paper designs and implements a relative positioning method suitable for swarm robots.After testing,this method can obtain the relative position between swarm robots without the assistance of known anchor nodes and servers.It also has high accuracy,and can meet the needs of the swarm algorithm for location information.