Simultaneous Acoustic Localization of Multiple Smartphones with Euclidean Distance Matrices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a system for localizing multiple smartphones simultaneously using acoustic signals and Euclidean distance matrices, achieving high accuracy without user interaction.

Contribution

It presents a novel joint localization approach for multiple devices using acoustic signals and a robust multi-dimensional scaling algorithm, with a practical prototype implementation.

Findings

Achieved 15 cm localization accuracy in real-world office scenarios.

Developed a precomputed schedule for acoustic pulse emission.

Demonstrated robustness with incomplete distance data.

Abstract

In this paper, we present an acoustic localization system for multiple devices. In contrast to systems which localise a device relative to one or several anchor points, we focus on the joint localisation of several devices relative to each other. We present a prototype of our system on off-the-shelf smartphones. No user interaction is required, the phones emit acoustic pulses according to a precomputed schedule. Using the elapsed time between two times of arrivals (ETOA) method with sample counting, distances between the devices are estimated. These, possibly incomplete, distances are the input to an efficient and robust multi-dimensional scaling algorithm returning a position for each phone. We evaluated our system in real-world scenarios, achieving error margins of 15 cm in an office environment.