Improving performance of pedestrian positioning by using vehicular communication signals

Pedestrian-to-vehicle communications, where pedestrian devices transmit their position information to nearby vehicles to indicate their presence, help to reduce pedestrian accidents. Satellite-based systems are widely used for pedestrian positioning, but have much degraded performance in urban canyon, where satellite signals are often obstructed by roadside buildings. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian positioning method, which leverages vehicular communication signals and uses vehicles as anchors. The performance of pedestrian positioning is improved from three aspects: (i) Channel state information instead of RSSI is used to estimate pedestrian-vehicle distance with higher precision. (ii) Only signals with line-of-sight path are used, and the property of distance error is considered. (iii) Fast mobility of vehicles is used to get diverse measurements, and Kalman filter is applied to smooth positioning results. Extensive evaluations, via trace-based simulation, confirm that (i) Fixing rate of positions can be much improved. (ii) Horizontal positioning error can be greatly reduced, nearly by one order compared with off-the-shelf receivers, by almost half compared with RSSI-based method, and can be reduced further to about 80cm when vehicle transmission period is 100ms and Kalman filter is applied. Generally, positioning performance increases with the number of available vehicles and their transmission frequency

A mosaic of eyes

Autonomous navigation is a traditional research topic in intelligent robotics and vehicles, which requires a robot to perceive its environment through onboard sensors such as cameras or laser scanners, to enable it to drive to its goal. Most research to date has focused on the development of a large and smart brain to gain autonomous capability for robots. There are three fundamental questions to be answered by an autonomous mobile robot: 1) Where am I going? 2) Where am I? and 3) How do I get there? To answer these basic questions, a robot requires a massive spatial memory and considerable computational resources to accomplish perception, localization, path planning, and control. It is not yet possible to deliver the centralized intelligence required for our real-life applications, such as autonomous ground vehicles and wheelchairs in care centers. In fact, most autonomous robots try to mimic how humans navigate, interpreting images taken by cameras and then taking decisions accordingly. They may encounter the following difficulties