ROLATIN: Robust Localization and Tracking for Indoor Navigation of Drones

In many drone applications, drones need the ability to fly fully or partially autonomously to carry out their mission. To enable such fully/partially autonomous flights, the ground control station that is supporting the drone’s operation needs to constantly localize and track the drone, and send this information to the drone’s navigation controller to enable autonomous/semiautonomous navigation. In outdoor environments, localization and tracking can be readily carried out using GPS and the drone’s Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). However, in indoor areas or GPS-denied environments, such an approach is not feasible. In this paper, we propose a localization and tracking scheme for drones called ROLATIN (Robust Localization and Tracking for Indoor Navigation of drones) that was specifically devised for GPS-denied environments. Instead of GPS signals, ROLATIN relies on speakergenerated ultrasonic acoustic signals to estimate the target drone’s location and track its movement. Compared to vision and RF signal-based methods, our scheme offers a number of advantages in terms of performance and cost.