Characterization of the indoor magnetic field for applications in Localization and Mapping

Abstract

To improve our understanding of the indoor properties of the perturbed Earth's magnetic field, we have developed a methodology to obtain dense and spatially referenced samples of the magnetic vector field on the ground's surface and in the free space above. This methodology draws on the use of various tracking techniques (photometric, odometric, and motion capture) to accurately determine the pose of the magnetic sensor, which can be positioned manually by humans or autonomously by robots to acquire densely gridded sample datasets. We show that the indoor magnetic field exhibits a fine-grained and persistent micro-structure of perturbations in terms of its direction and intensity. Instead of being a hindrance to indoor navigation, we believe that the variations of the three vector components are sufficiently expressive to form re-recognizable features based on which accurate localization is possible. We provide experimental results using our methodology to map the magnetic field on the ground's surface in our indoor research facilities. With the use of a magnetometer and very little computation, these resulting maps can serve to compensate the perturbations and subsequently determine pose of a human or robot in dead reckoning applications.