SIR LoCo - Smartphone localization integration in ROS for low-cost precision agriculture robots

Abstract

This thesis aims to evaluate and find a suitable way to localize farming robots and transmit other sensor information from an Android smartphone to it. Multiple agriculture robots utilize expensive RTK receivers and antennas, while old but still working smartphones are thrown away. With the results of this thesis, in most cases, an old smartphone could replace these expensive receivers and even do good to the environment by upcycling otherwise produced electronic waste. The performance was evaluated with and without additional hardware in five different scenarios to showcase different levels of complexity. Another benefit was utilizing multiple other smartphone sensors, even further reducing the need for extra hardware and, therefore, the overall cost and e-waste. One scenario even demonstrated the usage of a Linux subsystem on Android to run even more complex software, while improving the control and accuracy of the active GNSS receiver. It was possible to show that with the help of correction data, a horizontal localization error in the middle cm range could be achieved.