Joint Vehicular Localization and Reflective Mapping Based on Team Channel-SLAM

This paper addresses high-resolution vehicle positioning and tracking. In recent work, it was shown that a fleet of independent but neighboring vehicles can cooperate for the task of localization by capitalizing on the existence of common surrounding reflectors, using the concept of Team Channel-SLAM. This approach exploits an initial (e.g. GPS-based) vehicle position information and allows subsequent tracking of vehicles by exploiting the shared nature of virtual transmitters associated to the reflecting surfaces. In this paper, we show that the localization can be greatly enhanced by joint sensing and mapping of reflecting surfaces. To this end, we propose a combined approach coined Team Channel-SLAM Evolution (TCSE) which exploits the intertwined relation between (i) the position of virtual transmitters, (ii) the shape of reflecting surfaces, and (iii) the paths described by the radio propagation rays, in order to achieve high-resolution vehicle localization. Overall, TCSE yields a complete picture of the trajectories followed by dominant paths together with a mapping of reflecting surfaces. While joint localization and mapping is a well researched topic within robotics using inputs such as radar and vision, this paper is first to demonstrate such an approach within mobile networking framework based on radio data.

Vehicle Localization via Cooperative Channel Mapping

This paper addresses vehicle positioning, a topic whose importance has risen dramatically in the context of future autonomous driving systems. While classical methods that use GPS and/or beacon signals from network infrastructure for triangulation tend to be sensitive to multi-paths and signal obstruction, our method exhibits robustness with respect to such phenomena. Our approach builds on the recently proposed Channel-SLAM method which first enabled leveraging of multi-path so as to improve (single) vehicle positioning. Here, we propose a cooperative mapping approach which builds upon the Channel-SLAM concept, referred to here as Team Channel-SLAM. Team Channel-SLAM not only exploits the stationary nature of many reflecting objects around the vehicle, but also capitalizes on the multi-vehicle nature of road traffic. The key intuition behind our method is the exploitation for the first time of the correlation between reflectors around multiple neighboring vehicles. An algorithm is derived for reflector selection and estimation, combined with a team particle filter (TPF) so as to achieve high precision simultaneous multiple vehicle positioning. We obtain large improvement over the single-vehicle positioning scenario, with gains being already noticeable for moderate vehicle densities, such as over 40% improvement for a vehicle density as low as 4 vehicles in 132 meters' length road.