A Benchmarking Measurement Campaign to Support Ubiquitous Localization in GNSS Denied and Indoor Environments

Abstract

Localization in GNSS-denied/challenged indoor/outdoor and transitional environments represents a challenging research problem. As part of the joint IAG/FIG Working Groups 4.1.1 and 5.5 on Multi-sensor Systems, a benchmarking measurement campaign was conducted at The Ohio State University. Initial experiments have demonstrated that Cooperative Localization (CL) is extremely useful for positioning and navigation of platforms navigating in swarms or networks. In the data acquisition campaign, multiple sensor platforms, including vehicles, bicyclists and pedestrians were equipped with combinations of GNSS, Ultra-wide Band (UWB), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Raspberry Pi units, cameras, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and inertial sensors for CL. Pedestrians wore a specially designed helmet equipped with some of these sensors. An overview of the experimental configurations, test scenarios, characteristics and sensor specifications is given. It has been demonstrated that all involved sensor platforms in the different test scenarios have gained a significant increase in positioning accuracy by using ubiquitous user localization. For example, in the indoor environment, success rates of approximately 97% were obtained using Wi-Fi fingerprinting for correctly detecting the room-level location of the user. Using UWB, decimeter-level positioning accuracy is demonstrable achievable under certain conditions. The full sets of data is being made available to the wider research community through the WG on request.