Indoor Mapping Using the VLC Channel State Information

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging communication paradigm that can provide illumination, data communications, and localization services. In this study, a novel approach that uses VLC infrastructure and a photodetector is proposed to build a sparse map of an indoor area. VLC channel state information, which consists of the optical received signal strength and channel impulse response, is measured for wall/obstacle location estimation. The proposed algorithm uses the time-of-flight of the light to estimate the distance to the walls. The estimated wall locations are used as landmarks to build a sparse map of the indoor area. This technique can be used to estimate the distance to walls and objects in robotics applications. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be used to locate the agent and unknown LED locations using a simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm. Root mean square error of our wall localization algorithm is less than 10 cm when the VLC channel signal-to-noise ratio is 80 dB.