I am building a robot that I would like to be able to find its way towards a beacon in a relatively crowded indoor environment (so that the line of sight may be broken often). More specifically, I would like to use three beacons emitting some sort of signal for my robot to detect and differentiate between. I would need to know the distance to those beacons, and from that information I can detect my current location. What sensors would you recommend using?
The most common form of beacon is Infrared based, put a wall between you and the beacon and it may fail…
You could also go RF based and use time-of-flight to determine distance and triangulate your relative position.
The best suggestion we could make is an indoor localization system, such as the Hagisonic StarGazer, which provides very precise position and heading data.
