RAIL: Robust Acoustic Indoor Localization for Drones
Alireza Famili, Angelos Stavrou, Haining Wang, Jung‐Min Park
Abstract
Navigating in environments where the GPS signal is unavailable, weak, purposefully blocked, or spoofed has become crucial for a wide range of applications. A prime example is autonomous navigation for drones in indoor environments: to fly fully or partially autonomously, drones demand accurate and frequent updates of their locations. This paper proposes a Robust Acoustic Indoor Localization (RAIL) scheme for drones designed explicitly for GPS-denied environments. Instead of depending on GPS, RAIL leverages ultrasonic acoustic signals to achieve precise localization using a novel hybrid Frequency Hopping Code Division Multiple Access (FH-CDMA) technique. Contrary to previous approaches, RAIL is able to both overcome the multipath fading effect and provide precise signal separation in the receiver. Comprehensive simulations and experiments using a prototype implementation demonstrate that RAIL provides high-accuracy three-dimensional localization with an average error of less than 1.5 cm.