EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS FOR FINGERPRINTING INDOOR LOCALIZATION

One of the most preferred range-free indoor localization methods is the location fingerprinting. In the fingerprinting localization phase machine learning algorithms have widespread usage in estimating positions of the target node. The real challenge in indoor localization systems is to find out the proper machine learning algorithm. In this paper, three different machine learning algorithms for training the fingerprint database were used. We analysed the localization accuracy depending on a fingerprint density and number of line-of-sight (LOS) anchors. Experiments confirmed that Gaussian processes algorithm is superior to all other machine learning algorithms. The results prove that the localization accuracy can be achieved with a sub-decimetre resolution under typical real-world conditions

Benchmarking of localization solutions : guidelines for the selection of evaluation points

Indoor localization solutions are key enablers for next-generation indoor navigation and track and tracing solutions. As a result, an increasing number of different localization algorithms have been proposed and evaluated in scientific literature. However, many of these publications do not accurately substantiate the used evaluation methods. In particular, many authors utilize a different number of evaluation points, but they do not (i) analyze if the number of used evaluation points is sufficient to accurately evaluate the performance of their solutions and (ii) report on the uncertainty of the published results. To remedy this, this paper evaluates the influence of the selection of evaluation points. Based on statistical parameters such as the standard error of the mean value, an estimator is defined that can be used to quantitatively analyze the impact of the number of used evaluation points on the confidence interval of the mean value of the obtained results. This estimator is used to estimate the uncertainty of the presented accuracy results, and can be used to identify if more evaluations are required. To validate the proposed estimator, two different localization algorithms are evaluated in different testbeds and using different types of technology, showing that the number of required evaluation points does indeed vary significantly depending on the evaluated solution. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Map-Aware Models for Indoor Wireless Localization Systems: An Experimental Study

The accuracy of indoor wireless localization systems can be substantially enhanced by map-awareness, i.e., by the knowledge of the map of the environment in which localization signals are acquired. In fact, this knowledge can be exploited to cancel out, at least to some extent, the signal degradation due to propagation through physical obstructions, i.e., to the so called non-line-of-sight bias. This result can be achieved by developing novel localization techniques that rely on proper map-aware statistical modelling of the measurements they process. In this manuscript a unified statistical model for the measurements acquired in map-aware localization systems based on time-of-arrival and received signal strength techniques is developed and its experimental validation is illustrated. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed map-aware model is assessed and compared with that offered by its map-unaware counterparts. Our numerical results show that, when the quality of acquired measurements is poor, map-aware modelling can enhance localization accuracy by up to 110% in certain scenarios.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 1 table. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 201

Scan matching by cross-correlation and differential evolution

Scan matching is an important task, solved in the context of many high-level problems including pose estimation, indoor localization, simultaneous localization and mapping and others. Methods that are accurate and adaptive and at the same time computationally efficient are required to enable location-based services in autonomous mobile devices. Such devices usually have a wide range of high-resolution sensors but only a limited processing power and constrained energy supply. This work introduces a novel high-level scan matching strategy that uses a combination of two advanced algorithms recently used in this field: cross-correlation and differential evolution. The cross-correlation between two laser range scans is used as an efficient measure of scan alignment and the differential evolution algorithm is used to search for the parameters of a transformation that aligns the scans. The proposed method was experimentally validated and showed good ability to match laser range scans taken shortly after each other and an excellent ability to match laser range scans taken with longer time intervals between them.Web of Science88art. no. 85

Sparse 3D Point-cloud Map Upsampling and Noise Removal as a vSLAM Post-processing Step: Experimental Evaluation

The monocular vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) is one of the most challenging problem in mobile robotics and computer vision. In this work we study the post-processing techniques applied to sparse 3D point-cloud maps, obtained by feature-based vSLAM algorithms. Map post-processing is split into 2 major steps: 1) noise and outlier removal and 2) upsampling. We evaluate different combinations of known algorithms for outlier removing and upsampling on datasets of real indoor and outdoor environments and identify the most promising combination. We further use it to convert a point-cloud map, obtained by the real UAV performing indoor flight to 3D voxel grid (octo-map) potentially suitable for path planning.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, camera-ready version of paper for "The 3rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR 2018)

Managing big data experiments on smartphones

The explosive number of smartphones with ever growing sensing and computing capabilities have brought a paradigm shift to many traditional domains of the computing field. Re-programming smartphones and instrumenting them for application testing and data gathering at scale is currently a tedious and time-consuming process that poses significant logistical challenges. Next generation smartphone applications are expected to be much larger-scale and complex, demanding that these undergo evaluation and testing under different real-world datasets, devices and conditions. In this paper, we present an architecture for managing such large-scale data management experiments on real smartphones. We particularly present the building blocks of our architecture that encompassed smartphone sensor data collected by the crowd and organized in our big data repository. The given datasets can then be replayed on our testbed comprising of real and simulated smartphones accessible to developers through a web-based interface. We present the applicability of our architecture through a case study that involves the evaluation of individual components that are part of a complex indoor positioning system for smartphones, coined Anyplace, which we have developed over the years. The given study shows how our architecture allows us to derive novel insights into the performance of our algorithms and applications, by simplifying the management of large-scale data on smartphones