Demo Abstract: Indoor Positioning System in Visually-Degraded Environments with Millimetre-Wave Radar and Inertial Sensors
This addresses the problem of resilient indoor positioning for emergency responders like firefighters, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sensor fusion methods.
The paper tackles indoor positioning for emergency responders by fusing mmWave radar and IMU data, achieving real-time tracking at 10 FPS with good accuracy in visually-degraded environments.
Positional estimation is of great importance in the public safety sector. Emergency responders such as fire fighters, medical rescue teams, and the police will all benefit from a resilient positioning system to deliver safe and effective emergency services. Unfortunately, satellite navigation (e.g., GPS) offers limited coverage in indoor environments. It is also not possible to rely on infrastructure based solutions. To this end, wearable sensor-aided navigation techniques, such as those based on camera and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), have recently emerged recently as an accurate, infrastructure-free solution. Together with an increase in the computational capabilities of mobile devices, motion estimation can be performed in real-time. In this demonstration, we present a real-time indoor positioning system which fuses millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar and IMU data via deep sensor fusion. We employ mmWave radar rather than an RGB camera as it provides better robustness to visual degradation (e.g., smoke, darkness, etc.) while at the same time requiring lower computational resources to enable runtime computation. We implemented the sensor system on a handheld device and a mobile computer running at 10 FPS to track a user inside an apartment. Good accuracy and resilience were exhibited even in poorly illuminated scenes.