Enhanced WiFi localization system based on soft computing techniques to deal with small-scale variations in wireless sensors

Alonso, José María; Ocaña, Manuel; Hernández, Noelia; Herranz, Fernando; Llamazares, Ángel; Sotelo, Miguel Ángel; Bergasa, Luis M.; Magdalena, L.

Year: 2011

Type of Publication: Article

Keywords: Wireless localization; WiFi signal strength sensor; Fuzzy logic; Fuzzy modeling

Journal: Applied Soft Computing

Volume: 11

Number: 8

Pages: 4677-4691

Month: July

ISSN: 1568-4946

DOI: 10.1016/j.asoc.2011.07.015

Abstract:

The framework of this paper is robot localization inside buildings by means of wireless localization systems. Such kind of systems make use of the Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) signal strength sensors which are becoming more and more useful in the localization stage of several robotic platforms. Robot localization is usually made up of two phases: training and estimation stages. In the former, WiFi signal strength of all visible Access Points (APs) are collected and stored in a database or WiFi map. In the latter, the signal strengths received from all APs at a certain position are compared with the WiFi map to estimate the robot location. Hence, WiFi localization systems exploit the well-known path loss propagation model due to large-scale variations of WiFi signal to determine how closer the robot is to a certain AP. Unfortunately, there is another kind of signal variations called small-scale variations that have to be considered. They appear when robots move under the wavelength λ. In consequence, a chaotic noise is added to the signal strength measure yielding a lot of uncertainty that should be handled by the localization model. While lateral and orientation errors in the robot positioning stage are well studied and they remain under control thanks to the use of robust low-level controllers, more studies are needed when dealing with small-scale variations. Moreover, if the robot can not use a robust low-level controller because, for example, the environment is not organized in perpendicular corridors, then lateral and orientation errors can be significantly increased yielding a bad global localization and navigation performance. The main goal of this work is to strengthen the localization stage of our previous WiFi Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) Navigation System with the aim of dealing effectively with small-scale variations. In addition, looking for the applicability of our system to a wider variety of environments, we relax the necessity of having a robust low-level controller. To do that, this paper proposes the use of a Soft Computing based system to tackle with the uncertainty related to both the small-scale variations and the lack of a robust low-level controller. The proposed system is actually implemented in the form of a Fuzzy Rule-based System and it has been evaluated in two real test-beds and robotic platforms. Experimental results show how our system is easily adaptable to new environments where classical localization techniques can not be applied since the AP physical location is unknown.