[RyanCahoon]

Originally Posted by mreda

thats more along the lines of what i was thinking. Is there a system out there that has this already?

For the kind of accuracy (a few centimeters over a work area that I would guess is at least 10 meters on a side) and price point (less than $1000) you seem to be going for, you're probably not going to find some ready-made solution.

You may be able to find a cheaper option, but with 5-10 minutes of searching, the cheapest 360* camera that supports live streaming to a computer that I could find is the $449 VSN MOBIL V.360° with a $299 HDMI converter. If you want 360* coverage, another certainly cheaper option is to get several webcams pointed in different directions - the downside to this approach is you have to do all the extrinsic camera calibration yourself, which is generally a pain. I might recommend starting with just a single camera with a wide angle lens (be aware that you'll have to correct for distortion).

You can use one of the existing visual fiducial tracking libraries. I mentioned AprilTags already; ARToolKit is also widely-used. If you have a good view of the fiducial marker tag (place lots of tags around the area so the robot always has a good view of at least one), these libraries will give you a 6D pose estimate of the tag relative to the camera. You can invert this to give you the position of the robot relative to the tag, which then gives you the absolute pose of the robot when you add it to the known position and orientation of the tag.

Once you have position estimates derived from the individual observed beacons, you can fuse them to create a more accurate position estimate for the robot. There are fancier methods available, but a 90% solution could probably be achieved with a Kalman filter and a few heuristics for resetting.

Here's a couple of projects that claim to do similar to what you're asking (I haven't tried them personally):
- https://github.com/ProjectArtemis/aprilslam
- http://pharos.ece.utexas.edu/wiki/in...SimonSays_Demo
- https://github.com/LofaroLabs/POLARIS / http://wiki.lofarolabs.com/index.php..._Indoor_System