FEEL: Fast, Energy-Efficient Localization for Autonomous Indoor Vehicles

TL;DR

FEEL is an indoor localization system for autonomous vehicles that combines low-energy sensors with adaptive sensing to achieve high accuracy, low latency, and energy efficiency in warehouse environments.

Contribution

This paper introduces FEEL, a novel indoor localization system using sensor fusion and adaptive sensing to improve energy efficiency and accuracy for autonomous indoor vehicles.

Findings

Localization accuracy of <7cm achieved

Latency around 3ms demonstrated

Up to 20% energy savings with ASA

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles have created a sensation in both outdoor and indoor applications. The famous indoor use-case is process automation inside a warehouse using Autonomous Indoor Vehicles (AIV). These vehicles need to locate themselves not only with an accuracy of a few centimetres but also within a few milliseconds in an energy-efficient manner. Due to these challenges, localization is a holy grail. In this paper, we propose FEEL - an indoor localization system that uses a fusion of three low-energy sensors: IMU, UWB, and radar. We provide detailed software and hardware architecture of FEEL. Further, we propose Adaptive Sensing Algorithm (ASA) for opportunistically minimizing energy consumption of FEEL by adjusting the sensing frequency to the dynamics of the physical environment. Our extensive performance evaluation over diverse test settings reveal that FEEL provides a localization accuracy of <7cm with ultra-low latency of around 3ms. Further, ASA yields up to 20% energy saving with only a marginal trade-off in accuracy.