Fast Signals of Opportunity Fingerprint Database Maintenance with Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Indoor Positioning

Indoor positioning technology based on Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) fingerprints is a potential navigation solution, which has the advantages of simple implementation, low cost and high precision. However, as the radio frequency signals can be easily affected by the environmental change during its transmission, it is quite necessary to build location fingerprint database in advance and update it frequently, thereby guaranteeing the positioning accuracy. At present, the fingerprint database building methods mainly include point collection and line acquisition, both of which are usually labor-intensive and time consuming, especially in a large map area. This paper proposes a fast and efficient location fingerprint database construction and updating method based on a self-developed Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) platform NAVIS, called Automatic Robot Line Collection. A smartphone was installed on NAVIS for collecting indoor Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) fingerprints of Signals of Opportunity (SOP), such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Meanwhile, indoor map was created by 2D LiDAR-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology. The UGV automatically traverse the unknown indoor environment due to a pre-designed full-coverage path planning algorithm. Then, SOP sensors collect location fingerprints and generates grid map during the process of environment-traversing. Finally, location fingerprint database is built or updated by Kriging interpolation. Field tests were carried out to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The results showed that, compared with the traditional point collection and line collection schemes, the root mean square error of the fingerprinting-based positioning results were reduced by 35.9% and 25.0% in static tests and 30.0% and 21.3% respectively in dynamic tests. Moreover, our UGV can traverse the indoor environment autonomously without human-labor on data acquisition, the efficiency of the automatic robot line collection scheme is 2.65 times and 1.72 times that of the traditional point collection and the traditional line acquisition, respectively.