Cooperative Exploitation for Indoor Geolocation

A. Soloviev, C. Yang

Abstract:	Urban and indoor environments present unique challenges to the development and deployment of miniature autonomous systems. Cooperative simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) and network exploitation of signals of opportunity (SOOP) are promising technologies helping solve these problems. The SLAM enables a mobile agent placed at an unknown location in an unknown environment to incrementally build a consistent map of the environment while to simultaneously determine its location within this map. This helps answer such questions as “where am I,” “where is the place to go,” and “what are possible ways to get there.” However, by itself, the SLAM only produces a local map in the mobile agent’s local coordinate frame and it is a lengthy process for a single SLAM agent to survey a large complex. On the other hand, the use of cooperative SLAM agents not only speeds up the map building process but also enables network exploitation of signals of opportunity for geolocation in a GPS-denied environment. This also facilitates the transitions from outdoor to indoor and vice versa. In this paper, we will investigate several technical issues associated with cooperation between SLAM agents for local map registration and fusion as well as for conversion from local coordinates to a global coordinate frame for geolocation. The particular SLAM agents investigated in this paper are equipped with low-cost IMU, video camera, and ladar (on the master agent only). Geolocation is determined with long-range signals of opportunity such as digital TV signals and short-range signals of opportunity such as Wi-Fi signals. It will also analyze geometric factors that affect feature selection and trajectory optimization in SLAM and positioning accuracy with SOOP. Simulation results will be presented to illustrate the operational concepts and performance prediction.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013) September 16 - 20, 2013 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	1024 - 1032
Cite this article:	Soloviev, A., Yang, C., "Cooperative Exploitation for Indoor Geolocation," Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013), Nashville, TN, September 2013, pp. 1024-1032.
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