The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high localization accuracy.
A common approach to localization within existing radio frequency (RF)-based beacon networks is to use the received signal strength (RSS) as a fingerprint that is matched against a database of RSS-location pairs to determine the receiver's location @cite_23 . This database is typically generated manually via a site-survey,
@cite_23
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The recent growing interest for indoor Location-Based Services (LBSs) has created a need for more accurate and real-time indoor positioning solutions. The sparse nature of location finding makes the theory of Compressive Sensing (CS) desirable for accurate indoor positioning using Received Signal Strength (RSS) from Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Access Points (APs). We propose an accurate RSS-based indoor positioning system using the theory of compressive sensing, which is a method to recover sparse signals from a small number of noisy measurements by solving an 1-minimization problem. Our location estimator consists of a coarse localizer, where the RSS is compared to a number of clusters to detect in which cluster the node is located, followed by a fine localization step, using the theory of compressive sensing, to further refine the location estimation. We have investigated different coarse localization schemes and AP selection approaches to increase the accuracy. We also show that the CS theory can be used to reconstruct the RSS radio map from measurements at only a small number of fingerprints, reducing the number of measurements significantly. We have implemented the proposed system on a WiFi-integrated mobile device and have evaluated the performance. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system leads to substantial improvement on localization accuracy and complexity over the widely used traditional fingerprinting methods.