Evaluation of Smartphone IMUs for Small Mobile Search and Rescue Robots
This work addresses the need for cost-effective and lightweight components in small search and rescue robots, though it is incremental as it focuses on sensor evaluation rather than new robot designs.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating smartphone IMUs for small mobile search and rescue robots by testing them under static and dynamic conditions, finding that they show errors comparable to professional IMUs in some scenarios.
Small mobile robots are an important class of Search and Rescue Robots. Integrating all required components into such small robots is a difficult engineering task. Smartphones have already been made small, lightweight and cheap by the industry and are thus an excellent candidate as main controller for such robots. In this paper we outline how ROS can be used on Android devices and then evaluate one sensor which is very important for mobile robots: the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Experiments are performed under static and dynamic conditions to measure the error of the IMUs of three smartphones and three professional IMUs. In the experiments we make use of a tracking system and an autonomous mobile robot.