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Article

Decision-Level Multi-Sensor Coordination for Robust Navigation and High-Precision Planar Positioning of Industrial Mobile Robots

1
School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China
2
School of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China
3
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2026, 26(17), 5655; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26175655 (registering DOI)
Submission received: 9 August 2026 / Revised: 28 August 2026 / Accepted: 3 September 2026 / Published: 5 September 2026
(This article belongs to the Section Sensors and Robotics)

Abstract

High-precision manufacturing in unstructured factories imposes stringent requirements on real-time scene perception and end-effector positioning accuracy. Traditional single-sensor solutions suffer from perception blind spots in human-robot mixed environments with complex lighting, while chassis cumulative error often leads to rigid collisions during end-effector operations. To address this, this paper proposes and evaluates a decision-level multi-sensor coordination mechanism for robust navigation and high-precision planar positioning of industrial mobile robots. The mechanism assigns explicit sensor roles, distance-dependent trigger conditions, and deterministic safety priorities. At the navigation and obstacle avoidance level, a sequential decision policy is constructed: macroscopically, a lightweight You Only Look Once version 5 small (YOLOv5s) is utilized for the early detection of dynamic objects, providing bounding-box coordinates to trigger preemptive deceleration, while LiDAR independently provides geometric ranging for ROS local-costmap updating and detour replanning; microscopically, a low-level hardware interrupt strategy triggered by ultrasonic sensors is proposed to mitigate near-field blind spots and reduce communication latency. At the end-effector positioning level, under illumination conditions ranging from 200 to 1000 lux, an adaptive alignment algorithm combining hue-saturation-value color-space morphological processing and Kalman filtering is proposed to suppress measurement noise caused by illumination variations and mechanical vibrations. Experiments in the tested dynamic human-robot mixed scenarios showed no rigid collisions for the proposed system and an emergency response time of approximately 50 ms against sudden blind-spot intrusions. Simultaneously, the system achieves a 95% reliability rate in controlling the end-effector 2D planar positioning error (X-Y plane) within a ±2 mm tolerance under complex illumination interference. These results demonstrate improved navigation safety and planar-positioning reliability under the tested flexible-manufacturing conditions.
Keywords: edge computing; decision-level multi-sensor coordination; industrial mobile robot; robust navigation; planar positioning; visual servoing; YOLOv5s edge computing; decision-level multi-sensor coordination; industrial mobile robot; robust navigation; planar positioning; visual servoing; YOLOv5s

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Liu, T.-X.; You, M.-W.; Zhang, Z.-Y.; Sun, Y.; Liu, C.-Y.; Qian, K.; Lu, X.-Y. Decision-Level Multi-Sensor Coordination for Robust Navigation and High-Precision Planar Positioning of Industrial Mobile Robots. Sensors 2026, 26, 5655. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26175655

AMA Style

Liu T-X, You M-W, Zhang Z-Y, Sun Y, Liu C-Y, Qian K, Lu X-Y. Decision-Level Multi-Sensor Coordination for Robust Navigation and High-Precision Planar Positioning of Industrial Mobile Robots. Sensors. 2026; 26(17):5655. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26175655

Chicago/Turabian Style

Liu, Teng-Xiao, Ming-Wei You, Zi-Yi Zhang, Yan Sun, Cheng-Yuan Liu, Kun Qian, and Xue-Yu Lu. 2026. "Decision-Level Multi-Sensor Coordination for Robust Navigation and High-Precision Planar Positioning of Industrial Mobile Robots" Sensors 26, no. 17: 5655. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26175655

APA Style

Liu, T.-X., You, M.-W., Zhang, Z.-Y., Sun, Y., Liu, C.-Y., Qian, K., & Lu, X.-Y. (2026). Decision-Level Multi-Sensor Coordination for Robust Navigation and High-Precision Planar Positioning of Industrial Mobile Robots. Sensors, 26(17), 5655. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26175655

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