Cosero, Find My Keys! Object Localization and Retrieval Using Bluetooth Low Energy Tags

Personal robots will contribute mobile manipulation capabilities to our future smart homes. In this paper, we propose a low-cost object localization system that uses static devices with Bluetooth capabilities, which are distributed in an environment, to detect and localize active Bluetooth beacons and mobile devices. This system can be used by a robot to coarsely localize objects in retrieval tasks. We attach small Bluetooth low energy tags to objects and require at least four static Bluetooth receivers. While commodity Bluetooth devices could be used, we have built low-cost receivers from Raspberry Pi computers. The location of a tag is estimated by lateration of its received signal strengths. In experiments, we evaluate accuracy and timing of our approach, and report on the successful demonstration at the RoboCup German Open 2014 competition in Magdeburg.