Battracker: High precision infrastructure-free mobile device tracking in indoor environments

Continuous tracking of the device location in 3D space is a popular form of user input, especially for virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR), video games and health rehabilitation. Conventional inertial based approaches are well known for inaccuracy caused by large error drifts. Computer vision approaches can produce accuracy tracking but have privacy concerns and are subject to lighting conditions and computation complexity. Recent work exploits accurate acoustic distance measurements for high precision tracking. However, they require additional hardware (e.g., multiple external speakers), which adds to the costs and installation efforts, thus limiting the convenience and usability. In this paper, we propose BatTracker, which incorporates inertial and acoustic data for robust, high precision and infrastructure-free tracking in indoor environments. BatTracker leverages echoes from nearby objects and uses distance measurements from them to correct error accumulation in inertial based device position prediction. It incorporates Doppler shifts and echo amplitudes to reliably identify the association between echoes and objects despite noisy signals from multi-path reflection and cluttered environment. A probabilistic algorithm creates, prunes and evolves multiple hypotheses based on measurement evidences to accommodate uncertainty in device position. Experiments in real environments show that BatTracker can track a mobile device’s movements in 3D space at sub-cm level accuracy, comparable to the state-of-the-art infrastructure based approaches, while eliminating the needs of any additional hardware.