Guoguo: Enabling Fine-Grained Smartphone Localization via Acoustic Anchors

Modern smartphones and location-based services and apps are poised to transform our daily life. However, current smartphone-based localization solutions are limited mainly to outdoor, mostly missing practical, robust and accurate indoor location solutions. Despite significant efforts on indoor localization in both academia and industry in the past two decades, highly accurate and practical smartphone-based indoor localization remains an open problem. To enable indoor location-based services (ILBS), e.g., step-by-step navigation for the Blind and visually impaired, there are several stringent requirements: highly accurate (foot-level); no additional hardware components or extensions on users' smartphones; scalable to massive concurrent users. Current GPS, Radio RSS (e.g. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee), or Fingerprinting based solutions can only achieve meter-level or room-level accuracy. In this paper, we propose a practical and accurate solution that fills the long-lasting gap of smartphone-based fine-grained indoor localization. Specifically, we design and implement an indoor localization ecosystem Guoguo. Guoguo consists of an anchor network with a coordination protocol to transmit modulated localization beacons using high-band acoustic signals, a realtime processing app in a smartphone, and a backend server for indoor contexts and location-based services. We further propose approaches to improve its coverage, accuracy, and location update rate with low-power consumption. Our prototype shows centimeter-level localization accuracy in several typical indoor environments. Such precise indoor localization is expected to have high impact in the future ILBS and our daily activities.

[1]  Yin Chen,et al.  FM-based indoor localization , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[2]  Moe Z. Win,et al.  Threshold-Based Time-of-Arrival Estimators in UWB Dense Multipath Channels , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[3]  Jean Rouat,et al.  Robust sound source localization using a microphone array on a mobile robot , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[4]  Injong Rhee,et al.  Towards Mobile Phone Localization without War-Driving , 2010, 2010 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[5]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  WALRUS: wireless acoustic location with room-level resolution using ultrasound , 2005, MobiSys '05.

[6]  Tamer Nadeem,et al.  SpyLoc: A light weight localization system for smartphones , 2013, 2014 Eleventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON).

[7]  Xiaolin Li,et al.  Guoguo: enabling fine-grained indoor localization via smartphone , 2013, MobiSys '13.

[8]  Andy Hopper,et al.  The active badge location system , 1992, TOIS.

[9]  Anthony Rowe,et al.  Indoor pseudo-ranging of mobile devices using ultrasonic chirps , 2012, SenSys '12.

[10]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[11]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  LANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID , 2004, Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2003. (PerCom 2003)..

[12]  Guobin Shen,et al.  BeepBeep: a high accuracy acoustic ranging system using COTS mobile devices , 2007, SenSys '07.

[13]  A. Haghighat,et al.  Beep: 3D indoor positioning using audible sound , 2005, Second IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2005. CCNC. 2005.

[14]  Robert A. Scholtz,et al.  Ranging in a dense multipath environment using an UWB radio link , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[15]  Ian R. Petersen,et al.  Robust Kalman Filtering for Signals and Systems with Large Uncertainties , 1999 .

[16]  Christian Schindelhauer,et al.  Acoustic Self-calibrating System for Indoor Smartphone Tracking (ASSIST) , 2012, 2012 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN).

[17]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  EnLoc: Energy-Efficient Localization for Mobile Phones , 2009, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[18]  Peter A. Dinda,et al.  Indoor localization without infrastructure using the acoustic background spectrum , 2011, MobiSys '11.

[19]  R.L. Moses,et al.  Locating the nodes: cooperative localization in wireless sensor networks , 2005, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[20]  Jie Yang,et al.  Push the limit of WiFi based localization for smartphones , 2012, Mobicom '12.

[21]  Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard,et al.  EnTracked: energy-efficient robust position tracking for mobile devices , 2009, MobiSys '09.

[22]  Huarui Yin,et al.  Low Complexity Tri-Level Sampling Receiver Design for UWB Time-of-Arrival Estimation , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[23]  Guobin Shen,et al.  BeepBeep: A high-accuracy acoustic-based system for ranging and localization using COTS devices , 2012, TECS.

[24]  Venkata N. Padmanabhan,et al.  Centaur: locating devices in an office environment , 2012, Mobicom '12.

[25]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  SurroundSense: mobile phone localization via ambience fingerprinting , 2009, MobiCom '09.

[26]  Xiaolin Li,et al.  Towards accurate acoustic localization on a smartphone , 2013, 2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[27]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  Did you see Bob?: human localization using mobile phones , 2010, MobiCom.

[28]  Tamer Nadeem,et al.  RF-Beep: A light ranging scheme for smart devices , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

[29]  Moustafa Youssef,et al.  No need to war-drive: unsupervised indoor localization , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[30]  Hari Balakrishnan,et al.  6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MOBICOM ’00) The Cricket Location-Support System , 2022 .

[31]  Xiaolin Li,et al.  Acoustic ranging and communication via microphone channel , 2012, 2012 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).

[32]  David Chu,et al.  SwordFight: enabling a new class of phone-to-phone action games on commodity phones , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[33]  Hiroyuki Morikawa,et al.  DOLPHIN: A Practical Approach for Implementing a Fully Distributed Indoor Ultrasonic Positioning System , 2004, UbiComp.

[34]  James D. Taylor.  Ultra-wideband Radar Technology , 2000 .