Attention and Anticipation in Fast Visual-Inertial Navigation

We study a Visual-Inertial Navigation (VIN) problem in which a robot needs to estimate its state using an on-board camera and an inertial sensor, without any prior knowledge of the external environment. We consider the case in which the robot can allocate limited resources to VIN, due to tight computational constraints. Therefore, we answer the following question: under limited resources, what are the most relevant visual cues to maximize the performance of visual-inertial navigation? Our approach has four key ingredients. First, it is task-driven, in that the selection of the visual cues is guided by a metric quantifying the VIN performance. Second, it exploits the notion of anticipation, since it uses a simplified model for forward-simulation of robot dynamics, predicting the utility of a set of visual cues over a future time horizon. Third, it is efficient and easy to implement, since it leads to a greedy algorithm for the selection of the most relevant visual cues. Fourth, it provides formal performance guarantees: we leverage submodularity to prove that the greedy selection cannot be far from the optimal (combinatorial) selection. Simulations and real experiments on agile drones show that our approach ensures state-of-the-art VIN performance while maintaining a lean processing time. In the easy scenarios, our approach outperforms appearance-based feature selection in terms of localization errors. In the most challenging scenarios, it enables accurate visual-inertial navigation while appearance-based feature selection fails to track robot's motion during aggressive maneuvers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Chapter Cooperative Game Theory and Its Application in Localization Algorithms

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Power Allocation and Parameter Estimation for Multipath-based 5G Positioning

We consider a single-anchor multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing system with imperfectly synchronized transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) clocks, where the Rx estimates its position based on the received reference signals. The Tx, having (imperfect) prior knowledge about the Rx location and the surrounding geometry, transmits reference signals based on a set of fixed beams. We develop strategies for the power allocation among the beams aiming to minimize the expected Cram\ue9r-Rao lower bound for Rx positioning. Additional constraints on the design are included to make the optimized power allocation robust to uncertainty on the line-of-sight (LOS) path direction. Furthermore, the effect of clock asynchronism on the proposed allocation strategies is studied. Our evaluation results show that, for non-negligible synchronization error, it is optimal to allocate a large fraction of the available power for the illumination of the non-LOS (NLOS) paths, which help resolve the clock offset. In addition, the complexity reduction achieved by our proposed suboptimal approach incurs only a small performance degradation. We also propose an off-grid compressed sensing-based position estimation algorithm, which exploits the information on the clock offset provided by NLOS paths, and show that it is asymptotically efficient

On Modeling Coverage and Rate of Random Cellular Networks under Generic Channel Fading

In this paper we provide an analytic framework for computing the expected downlink coverage probability, and the associated data rate of cellular networks, where base stations are distributed in a random manner. The provided expressions are in computable integral forms that accommodate generic channel fading conditions. We develop these expressions by modelling the cellular interference using stochastic geometry analysis, then we employ them for comparing the coverage resulting from various channel fading conditions namely Rayleigh and Rician fading, in addition to the fading-less channel. Furthermore, we expand the work to accommodate the effects of random frequency reuse on the cellular coverage and rate. Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis, where the results show a very close match