Simultaneous Localization of a Receiver and Mapping of Multipath Generating Geometry in Indoor Environments

This paper presents an algorithm that aims at combining the pre-existing and dominating applications of radio signals, namely communication, navigation and sensing of an environment into an integrated approach. In wireless propagation the transmitted signal is reflected and scattered by objects. Especially in indoor or urban scenarios, the signal reaching the receive antenna consists of multiple paths, called multipath. Multipath reception degrades the accuracy of the positioning device as long as the receiver is based on standard methods. With Channel-SLAM we introduced an algorithm which uses multipath components (MPCs) for positioning instead of mitigating them. In this paper, we show that MPCs allow us in addition to estimating the position of a receiver, to estimate the locations of reflecting surfaces and scatterers. We show that these estimations relate to floor plans of indoor environments. To verify the proposed algorithm, we evaluate the algorithm based on measurements using an ultra-wideband (UWB) system, the Decawaves DW1000 UWB transceiver.