WiROS: WiFi sensing toolbox for robotics

TL;DR

WiROS is a comprehensive, open-source WiFi sensing toolbox designed for robotics, providing easy access to WiFi measurements and algorithms to enhance robot perception and navigation.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, plug-and-play ROS toolbox that offers various WiFi measurements and processing algorithms, facilitating widespread adoption in robotics.

Findings

Provides access to RSSI, CSI, and MAC-layer info via ROS topics

Includes algorithms for accurate WiFi bearing estimation

Open-sourced for community use and development

Abstract

Many recent works have explored using WiFi-based sensing to improve SLAM, robot manipulation, or exploration. Moreover, widespread availability makes WiFi the most advantageous RF signal to leverage. But WiFi sensors lack an accurate, tractable, and versatile toolbox, which hinders their widespread adoption with robot's sensor stacks. We develop WiROS to address this immediate need, furnishing many WiFi-related measurements as easy-to-consume ROS topics. Specifically, WiROS is a plug-and-play WiFi sensing toolbox providing access to coarse-grained WiFi signal strength (RSSI), fine-grained WiFi channel state information (CSI), and other MAC-layer information (device address, packet id's or frequency-channel information). Additionally, WiROS open-sources state-of-art algorithms to calibrate and process WiFi measurements to furnish accurate bearing information for received WiFi signals. The open-sourced repository is: https://github.com/ucsdwcsng/WiROS