RSSI based self-adaptive algorithms targeting indoor localisation under complex non-line of sight environments

Location Based Services (LBS) are a relatively recent multidisciplinary field which brings together many aspects of the fields of hardware design, digital signal processing (DSP), digital image processing (DIP), algorithm design in mathematics, and systematic implementation. LBS provide indirect location information from a variety of sensors and present these in an understandable and intuitive way to users by employing theories of data science and deep learning. Indoor positioning, which is one of the sub-applications of LBS, has become increasingly important with the development of sensor techniques and smart algorithms. The aim of this thesis is to explore the utilisation of indoor positioning algorithms under complex Non-Line of sight (LOS) environments in order to meet the requirements of both commercial and civil indoor localisation services. This thesis presents specific designs and implementations of solutions for indoor positioning systems from signal processing to positioning algorithms. Recently, with the advent of the protocol for the Bluetooth 4.0 technique, which is also called Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), researchers have increasingly begun to focus on developing received signal strength (RSS) based indoor localisation systems, as BLE based indoor positioning systems boast the advantages of lower cost and easier deployment condition. At the meantime, information providers of indoor positioning systems are not limited by RSS based sensors. Accelerometer and magnetic field sensors may also being applied for providing positioning information by referring to the users’ motion and orientation. With regards to this, both indoor localisation accuracy and positioning system stability can be increased by using hybrid positioning information sources in which these sensors are utilised in tandem. Whereas both RSS based sensors, such as BLE sensors, and other positioning information providers are limited by the fact that positioning information cannot be observed or acquired directly, which can be summarised into the Hidden Markov Mode (HMM). This work conducts a basic survey of indoor positioning systems, which include localisation platforms, using different hardware and different positioning algorithms based on these positioning platforms. By comparing the advantages of different hardware platforms and their corresponding algorithms, a Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) based positioning technique using BLE is selected as the main carrier of the proposed positioning systems in this research. The transmission characteristics of BLE signals are then introduced, and the basic theory of indoor transmission modes is detailed. Two filters, the smooth filter and the wavelet filter are utilised to de-noise the RSSI sequence in order to increase localisation accuracy. The theory behind these two filter types is introduced, and a set of experiments are conducted to compare the performance of these filters. The utilisation of two positioning systems is then introduced. A novel, off-set centroid core localisation algorithm is proposed firstly and the second one is a modified Monte Carlo localisation (MCL) algorithm based system. The first positioning algorithm utilises BLE as a positioning information provider and is implemented with a weighted framework for increasing localisation accuracy and system stability. The MCL algorithm is tailor-made in order to locate users’ position in an indoor environment using BLE and data received by sensors locating user position in an indoor environment. The key features in these systems are summarised in the following: the capacity of BLE to compute user position and achieve good adaptability in different environmental conditions, and the compatibility of implementing different information sources into these systems is very high. The contributions of this thesis are as follows: Two different filters were tailor-made for de-nosing the RSSI sequence. By applying these two filters, the localisation error caused by small scale fading is reduced significantly. In addition, the implementation for the two proposed are described. By using the proposed centroid core positioning algorithm in combination with a weighted framework, localisation inaccuracy is no greater than 5 metres under most complex indoor environmental conditions. Furthermore, MCL is modified and tailored for use with BLE and other sensor readings in order to compute user positioning in complex indoor environments. By using sensor readings from BLE beacons and other sensors, the stability and accuracy of the MCL based indoor position system is increased further

Cooperative Vehicle Tracking in Large Environments

Vehicle position tracking and prediction over large areas is of significant importance in many industrial applications, such as mining operations. In a small area, this can be easily achieved by providing vehicles with a constant communication link to a control centre and having the vehicles broadcast their position. The problem changes dramatically when vehicles operate within a large environment of potentially hundreds of square kilometres and in difficult terrain. This thesis presents algorithms for cooperative tracking of vehicles based on a vehicle motion model that incorporates the properties of the working area, and information collected by infrastructure collection points and other mobile agents. The probabilistic motion prediction approach provides long-term estimates of vehicle positions using motion profiles built for the particular environment and considering the vehicle stopping probability. A limited number of data collection points distributed around the field are used to update the position estimates, with negative information also used to improve the estimation. The thesis introduces the concept of observation harvesting, a process in which peer-to-peer communication between vehicles allows egocentric position updates and inter-vehicle measurements to be relayed among vehicles and finally conveyed to the collection points for an improved position estimate. It uses a store-and-synchronise concept to deal with intermittent communication and aims to disseminate data in an opportunistic manner. A nonparametric filtering algorithm for cooperative tracking is proposed to incorporate the information harvested, including the negative, relative, and time delayed observations. An important contribution of this thesis is to enable the optimisation of fleet scheduling when full coverage networks are not available or feasible. The proposed approaches were validated with comprehensive experimental results using data collected from a large-scale mining operation

Cooperative Vehicle Tracking in Large Environments

Vehicle position tracking and prediction over large areas is of significant importance in many industrial applications, such as mining operations. In a small area, this can be easily achieved by providing vehicles with a constant communication link to a control centre and having the vehicles broadcast their position. The problem changes dramatically when vehicles operate within a large environment of potentially hundreds of square kilometres and in difficult terrain. This thesis presents algorithms for cooperative tracking of vehicles based on a vehicle motion model that incorporates the properties of the working area, and information collected by infrastructure collection points and other mobile agents. The probabilistic motion prediction approach provides long-term estimates of vehicle positions using motion profiles built for the particular environment and considering the vehicle stopping probability. A limited number of data collection points distributed around the field are used to update the position estimates, with negative information also used to improve the estimation. The thesis introduces the concept of observation harvesting, a process in which peer-to-peer communication between vehicles allows egocentric position updates and inter-vehicle measurements to be relayed among vehicles and finally conveyed to the collection points for an improved position estimate. It uses a store-and-synchronise concept to deal with intermittent communication and aims to disseminate data in an opportunistic manner. A nonparametric filtering algorithm for cooperative tracking is proposed to incorporate the information harvested, including the negative, relative, and time delayed observations. An important contribution of this thesis is to enable the optimisation of fleet scheduling when full coverage networks are not available or feasible. The proposed approaches were validated with comprehensive experimental results using data collected from a large-scale mining operation

Modeling and interpolation of the ambient magnetic field by Gaussian processes

Anomalies in the ambient magnetic field can be used as features in indoor positioning and navigation. By using Maxwell's equations, we derive and present a Bayesian non-parametric probabilistic modeling approach for interpolation and extrapolation of the magnetic field. We model the magnetic field components jointly by imposing a Gaussian process (GP) prior on the latent scalar potential of the magnetic field. By rewriting the GP model in terms of a Hilbert space representation, we circumvent the computational pitfalls associated with GP modeling and provide a computationally efficient and physically justified modeling tool for the ambient magnetic field. The model allows for sequential updating of the estimate and time-dependent changes in the magnetic field. The model is shown to work well in practice in different applications: we demonstrate mapping of the magnetic field both with an inexpensive Raspberry Pi powered robot and on foot using a standard smartphone.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Efficient scene simulation for robust monte carlo localization using an RGB-D camera

This paper presents Kinect Monte Carlo Localization (KMCL), a new method for localization in three dimensional indoor environments using RGB-D cameras, such as the Microsoft Kinect. The approach makes use of a low fidelity a priori 3-D model of the area of operation composed of large planar segments, such as walls and ceilings, which are assumed to remain static. Using this map as input, the KMCL algorithm employs feature-based visual odometry as the particle propagation mechanism and utilizes the 3-D map and the underlying sensor image formation model to efficiently simulate RGB-D camera views at the location of particle poses, using a graphical processing unit (GPU). The generated 3D views of the scene are then used to evaluate the likelihood of the particle poses. This GPU implementation provides a factor of ten speedup over a pure distance-based method, yet provides comparable accuracy. Experimental results are presented for five different configurations, including: (1) a robotic wheelchair, (2) a sensor mounted on a person, (3) an Ascending Technologies quadrotor, (4) a Willow Garage PR2, and (5) an RWI B21 wheeled mobile robot platform. The results demonstrate that the system can perform robust localization with 3D information for motions as fast as 1.5 meters per second. The approach is designed to be applicable not just for robotics but other applications such as wearable computing

Sensor fusion for flexible human-portable building-scale mapping

This paper describes a system enabling rapid multi-floor indoor map building using a body-worn sensor system fusing information from RGB-D cameras, LIDAR, inertial, and barometric sensors. Our work is motivated by rapid response missions by emergency personnel, in which the capability for one or more people to rapidly map a complex indoor environment is essential for public safety. Human-portable mapping raises a number of challenges not encountered in typical robotic mapping applications including complex 6-DOF motion and the traversal of challenging trajectories including stairs or elevators. Our system achieves robust performance in these situations by exploiting state-of-the-art techniques for robust pose graph optimization and loop closure detection. It achieves real-time performance in indoor environments of moderate scale. Experimental results are demonstrated for human-portable mapping of several floors of a university building, demonstrating the system's ability to handle motion up and down stairs and to organize initially disconnected sets of submaps in a complex environment.Lincoln LaboratoryUnited States. Air Force (Contract FA8721-05-C-0002)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-10-1-0936)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-11-1-0688)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-12-10020

Robust indoor speaker recognition in a network of audio and video sensors

AbstractSituational awareness is achieved naturally by the human senses of sight and hearing in combination. Automatic scene understanding aims at replicating this human ability using microphones and cameras in cooperation. In this paper, audio and video signals are fused and integrated at different levels of semantic abstractions. We detect and track a speaker who is relatively unconstrained, i.e., free to move indoors within an area larger than the comparable reported work, which is usually limited to round table meetings. The system is relatively simple: consisting of just 4 microphone pairs and a single camera. Results show that the overall multimodal tracker is more reliable than single modality systems, tolerating large occlusions and cross-talk. System evaluation is performed on both single and multi-modality tracking. The performance improvement given by the audio–video integration and fusion is quantified in terms of tracking precision and accuracy as well as speaker diarisation error rate and precision–recall (recognition). Improvements vs. the closest works are evaluated: 56% sound source localisation computational cost over an audio only system, 8% speaker diarisation error rate over an audio only speaker recognition unit and 36% on the precision–recall metric over an audio–video dominant speaker recognition method

Active SLAM in structured environments

This paper considers the trajectory planning problem for line-feature based SLAM in structured indoor environments. The robot poses and line features are estimated using Smooth and Mapping (SAM) which is found to provide more consistent estimates than the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The objective of trajectory planning is to minimise the uncertainty of the estimates and to maximise coverage. Trajectory planning is performed using Model Predictive Control (MPC) with an attractor incorporating long term goals. This planning is demonstrated both in simulation and in a real-time experiment with a Pioneer2DX robot. ©2008 IEEE