Indoor navigation research with the Khepera III mobile robot: An experimental baseline with a case-study on ultra-wideband positioning

Recent substantial progress in the domain of indoor positioning systems and a growing number of indoor location-based applications are creating the need for systematic, efficient, and precise experimental methods able to assess the localization and perhaps also navigation performance of a given device. With hundreds of Khepera III robots in academic use today, this platform has an important potential for single- and multi-robot localization and navigation research. In this work, we develop a necessary set of models for mobile robot navigation with the Khepera III platform, and quantify the robot´s localization performance based on extensive experimental studies. Finally, we validate our experimental approach to localization research by considering the evaluation of an ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning system. We successfully show how the robotic platform can provide precise performance analyses, ultimately proposing a powerful approach towards advancements in indoor positioning technology.