Relative bearing estimation from commodity radios

Abstract

Relative bearing between robots is important in applications like pursuit-evasion [11] and SLAM [7]. This is also true in sensor networks, where the bearing of one sensor node relative to another has been used for localization [5], [18], [20] and topology control [14], [21], [6]. Most systems use dedicated sensors like an IR array or a camera to obtain relative bearing. We study the use of radio signal strength (RSS) in commodity radios for obtaining relative bearing. We show that by using the robot's mobility, commodity radios can be used to obtain coarse relative bearing. This measurement can be used for a suite of applications that do not require very precise bearing measurement. We analyze signal strength variations in simulation and experiment and also show an algorithm that uses this coarse bearing computation in a practical setting.