Demo Abstract: Indoor Positioning System in Visually-Degraded Environments with Millimetre-Wave Radar and Inertial Sensors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a real-time indoor positioning system that combines millimetre-wave radar and inertial sensors, providing robust and accurate tracking in visually-degraded environments without relying on GPS or infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a deep sensor fusion approach using mmWave radar and IMU data on mobile devices for resilient indoor positioning in challenging conditions.

Findings

Achieves accurate indoor tracking in smoke and darkness.

Operates at 10 FPS on handheld devices.

Shows robustness without GPS or infrastructure.

Abstract

Positional estimation is of great importance in the public safety sector. Emergency responders such as fire fighters, medical rescue teams, and the police will all benefit from a resilient positioning system to deliver safe and effective emergency services. Unfortunately, satellite navigation (e.g., GPS) offers limited coverage in indoor environments. It is also not possible to rely on infrastructure based solutions. To this end, wearable sensor-aided navigation techniques, such as those based on camera and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), have recently emerged recently as an accurate, infrastructure-free solution. Together with an increase in the computational capabilities of mobile devices, motion estimation can be performed in real-time. In this demonstration, we present a real-time indoor positioning system which fuses millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar and IMU data via deep sensor fusion. We employ mmWave radar rather than an RGB camera as it provides better robustness to visual degradation (e.g., smoke, darkness, etc.) while at the same time requiring lower computational resources to enable runtime computation. We implemented the sensor system on a handheld device and a mobile computer running at 10 FPS to track a user inside an apartment. Good accuracy and resilience were exhibited even in poorly illuminated scenes.