New technique aids indoor navigation for drones and robots

The technique from researchers at North Carolina State University measures speed and distance in indoor environments to track devices in near-real time.

“We call our approach Wi-Fi-assisted Inertial Odometry (WIO),” said Raghav Venkatnarayan, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a PhD student at NC State. “WIO uses Wi-Fi as a velocity sensor to accurately track how far something has moved. Think of it as sonar, but using radio waves, rather than sound waves.”

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Further reading

Sight of the navigator

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Devices such as smartphones incorporate inertial measurement units (IMUs) to calculate how far a device has moved, but IMUs suffer from large drift errors and minor inaccuracies can quickly become exaggerated.

In outdoor environments, many devices use GPS to correct their IMUs, but this doesn’t work in indoor areas where GPS signals are unreliable or non-existent.

“We created WIO to work in conjunction with a device’s IMU, correcting any errors and improving the accuracy of speed and distance calculations,” said Muhammad Shahzad, co-corresponding author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State. “This improvement in accuracy should also improve the calculations regarding a device’s precise location in any indoor environment where there is a Wi-Fi signal.”