Tightly-coupled-inertial-VLC-positioning-system


Authors: Chao qin from Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Relative two paper has been submitted to IEEE photonic technology letter and Chinese optic letter.


Abstract: Recently, it is believed that visible light communication (VLC) will take the lead in future indoor communication system as the popularization of high power LEDs. By taking advantages of VLC, many visible light positioning (VLP) algorithms emerged, however most of them required at least three visible LEDs and therefore can not cope with intermittent LED availability, under which fewer LEDs will be presented in image. To handle such a challenging condition, we propose a tightly-coupled inertial/visible-light positioning system with a visual-inertial sensor. Experimental results show that the proposed system not only achieves median location and orientation errors of 0.98 cm and 2.35$^{\circ}$ respectively with four visible LEDs, but also performs well with presence of intermittent LED availability.


Note: Considering that our research only focuses on demonstrating new positioning algorithm, it is fair to replace the LEDs with other alternatives such as April Tags (ATs)[1], a kind of QR-code-like visual patterns whose IDs can also be recognized by the camera, as long as no influence is made to the positioning performance. The realistic experimental setup and ATs can be seen as follows.

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[1] A robust and flexible visual fiducial system, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2011