Ciencias

Service Oriented Architecture for Mobile Robot Localization
Camilo Christo, Carlos Cardeira IDMEC/IST, Technical University of Lisbon Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal {cchristo, cardeira}@dem.ist.utl.pt Abstract
Sensors networks with some intelligence have been proposed for supporting mobile robot navigation systems in indoor environments. However, a standard method of communication among the sensor networks and the mobile robots still doesn’t exist and the introduction of new robots in a certain environment can be a difficult task. In this paper, we present a practical example that uses the emerging standard Web Services technology for communication and seamless integration of mobile robots and intelligent sensor networks, which is used for robot localization purposes.

1. Introduction
In a few years, autonomous mobile robots (MRs) will proliferate and become an important part of our daily lives. In our buildings MRs have possible applications in visits of labs and museums, material handling or even in the assistance of people in hospitals [1, 2, 5, 6]. 1.1 Localization

One of the keys for the mobile robot (MR) success in the accomplishment of these tasks is their navigation system. A robust navigation system depends on the correct knowledge of their position in the environment. The Global Position Systems (GPS) it is a good localization system but most work for outdoor MRs. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) for indoor use is still emerging [14]. To obtain the information of the indoor environment, the MRs need a great amount of sensors for the location and detection of obstacles and the use of a high computational power. However, the navigation capabilities of the MRs continues limited by the obstacles that it finds because the robot has not a global view of the entire environment. If the odometry fails the robot needs an easy and fast way to know where it is. Therefore, it is important to create systems for navigation that can report the MRs localization and