An real-time active beacon localization system for mobile robots is developed and implemented. This system permits the estimation of robot positions when detecting light sources by PSD(Position Sensitive Detector) sensor which are placed sparsely over the robots work space as beacons(or landmarks). An LSE(Least Square Estimation) method is introduced to calibrate the internal parameters of a model for the beacon and robot position. The proposed system has two operational modes of position estimation. One is the initial position calculation by the detection of two or more light sources positions of which are known. The other is the continuous position compensation that calculates the position and heading of the robot using the IEKF(Iterated Extended Kalman Filter) applied to the beacon and dead-reckoning data. Practical experiments show that the estimated position obtained by this system is precise enough to be useful for the navigation of robots.