Master of Sciences (Engineering), Case Western Reserve University, 2011, EECS - Electrical Engineering

This thesis describes a cost effective, accurate, and precise electronic navigation system which is suitable for outdoor commercial mobile robots. The hardware design of the system incorporates commercial off the shelf Global Positioning System receiver modules and support electronics. The software design of the system makes use of an open source positioning library to enable Real Time Kinematic satellite positioning. The designed navigation system has been integrated with a preexisting mobile robot platform, an autonomous robot lawn mower, which includes a set of reference sensors to provide accurate robot pose information. The reference platform is used to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the new cost effective system. A degradation factor of 1.7 in terms of positional accuracy is traded off in favor of achieving a cost savings factor of about thirty.

Committee: Roger Quinn PhD (Advisor); Roger Quinn PhD (Committee Chair); Marc Buchner PhD (Committee Member); Francis Merat PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Robotics; Robots