Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: We present Acoustic Inertial Measurement (AIM), a one-of-a-kind technique for indoor drone localization and tracking. Indoor drone localization and tracking are arguably a crucial, yet unsolved challenge: in GPS-denied environments, existing approaches enjoy limited applicability, especially in Non-Line of Sight (NLoS), require extensive environment instrumentation, or demand considerable hardware/software changes on drones. In contrast, AIM exploits the acoustic characteristics of the drones to estimate their location and derive their motion, even in NLoS settings. We tame location estimation errors using a dedicated Kalman filter and the Interquartile Range rule (IQR). We implement AIM using an off-the-shelf microphone array and evaluate its performance with a commercial drone under varied settings. Results indicate that the mean localization error of AIM is 46% lower than commercial UWB-based systems in complex indoor scenarios, where state-of-the-art infrared systems would not even work because of NLoS settings. We further demonstrate that AIM can be extended to support indoor spaces with arbitrary ranges and layouts without loss of accuracy by deploying distributed microphone arrays.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Sun, Yimiao, Wang, Weiguo, Mottola, Luca, Wang, Ruijin, He, Yuan
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6979277998
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: