WiFi-Inertial Indoor Pose Estimation for Micro Aerial Vehicles
This provides a practical, cost-free solution for MAV navigation in unknown indoor environments, addressing limitations of vision-based methods.
The paper tackles indoor pose estimation for micro aerial vehicles using a single WiFi access point and inertial sensors, achieving a position error of 61.7 cm and an attitude error of 0.92°.
This paper presents an indoor pose estimation system for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) with a single WiFi access point. Conventional approaches based on computer vision are limited by illumination conditions and environmental texture. Our system is free of visual limitations and instantly deployable, working upon existing WiFi infrastructure without any deployment cost. Our system consists of two coupled modules. First, we propose an angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation algorithm to estimate MAV attitudes and disentangle the AoA for positioning. Second, we formulate a WiFi-inertial sensor fusion model that fuses the AoA and the odometry measured by inertial sensors to optimize MAV poses. Considering the practicality of MAVs, our system is designed to be real-time and initialization-free for the need of agile flight in unknown environments. The indoor experiments show that our system achieves the accuracy of pose estimation with the position error of $61.7$ cm and the attitude error of $0.92^\circ$.