SparkFun Electronics Forum

As hobbyist project, I built a raspberryPi-based wifi-enabled droid that can home-in on moving objects such as our pet house rabbit (uses https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05863) around a living room. When the droid's batteries are low, I want the droid to find its way back to its charging base.

What techniques could I use to get the droid to find its way back to its charging base without having an internal map of the area? I think it just needs to know how far away it is from the base; the rest can be done with wheel encoder data and obstacle detection. Assume no line of sight.

I haven't actually figured out how to build a wireless charging base or detect the battery level of my droid, but one problem at a time...

Thanks for any pointers.

Indoor localization is a surprisingly difficult problem. One solution is Pozyx, but it is expensive.

See https://www.pozyx.io/

$280! But it looks great, thank you. Invaluable just to know that this problem is called "indoor localization".