CoBe -- Coded Beacons for Localization, Object Tracking, and SLAM Augmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust, fast beacon coding protocol for optical localization and SLAM augmentation, enabling real-time, low-cost, and accurate tracking without synchronization, suitable for diverse environments.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel beacon coding protocol that is robust to errors and does not require synchronization, along with a practical implementation for real-time localization and SLAM enhancement.

Findings

Achieves high accuracy in real-world experiments

Operates in real-time on low-cost IoT hardware

Improves landmark identification for SLAM systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel beacon light coding protocol, which enables fast and accurate identification of the beacons in an image. The protocol is provably robust to a predefined set of detection and decoding errors, and does not require any synchronization between the beacons themselves and the optical sensor. A detailed guide is then given for developing an optical tracking and localization system, which is based on the suggested protocol and readily available hardware. Such a system operates either as a standalone system for recovering the six degrees of freedom of fast moving objects, or integrated with existing SLAM pipelines providing them with error-free and easily identifiable landmarks. Based on this guide, we implemented a low-cost positional tracking system which can run in real-time on an IoT board. We evaluate our system's accuracy and compare it to other popular methods which utilize the same optical hardware, in experiments where the ground truth is known. A companion video containing multiple real-world experiments demonstrates the accuracy, speed, and applicability of the proposed system in a wide range of environments and real-world tasks. Open source code is provided to encourage further development of low-cost localization systems integrating the suggested technology at its navigation core.