A Sectional Auto-docking Charging Control Method for the Mobile Robot

This paper brings forwards a new Auto-docking charging method for the mobile robot based on infrared and ultrasonic sensors. The auto docking process can be divided into three sections: wall following, coarse positioning and accurate positioning. The method involves two devices: one device installed on a mobile robot includes two infrared receivers, at least two ultrasonic transceivers and a RF transceiver; the other one fixed on a charging pile contains an infrared transmitter, two ultrasonic transmitters and a RF transceiver. As usual, a wall following algorithm and the infrared sensors are used to help the mobile robot find rough direction of the charging pile. An adaptive square-root unscented Kalman filter (ASUKF) with several ultrasonic measurements are used to obtain precise relative pose in this paper. In order to reduce the dimension of the system and the computational complexity, an innovative master-slave filter structure is designed. The simulation results show that, this method is feasible and effective, and also can satisfy the demands of auto-docking charging for the mobile robot.