Calibration and guidance of agents based on tubes

In order to correct the position and orientation of autonomous mobile robots in buildings TL-tubes can be used as landmarks. Low-budged properly calibrated cameras looking up towards the ceiling can be used to detect the position and orientation of the tubes and to correct the dead-reckoned robot position according to that measurement. The camera calibration- and image recognition algorithms for tubes that may be on or off, work under different outside building lightning conditions. The algorithms are described and are shown to be extremely simple. Experiments show that by using this method the positioning of the robots can be kept accurate, especially its orientation. The expected and measured errors are theoretically explained.