Wi-Drone: Wi-Fi-based 6-DoF Tracking for Indoor Drone Flight Control

Abstract

After years of boom, drones and their applications are now entering indoors. Six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose tracking is the core of drone flight control, but existing solutions cannot be directly applied to indoor scenarios due to insufficient accuracy, low robustness to adverse texture and light conditions, and signal obstruction in indoor scenarios. To overcome the above limitations, we propose Wi-Drone, a Wi-Fi standalone 6-DoF tracking system for indoor drone flight control. Wi-Drone takes full advantage of both exte-roceptive and proprioceptive measurements of Wi-Fi to estimate the drone's absolute pose and relative motion, and fuse them in a tight-coupling manner to achieve their complementary benefits. We implement Wi-Drone and integrate it into a flight control system. The evaluation results show that Wi-Drone achieves a real-time performance with the average location accuracy of 26.1 cm and the rotation accuracy of 3.8°, which demonstrates its competency of flight control, compared to visual-inertial-based flight control. Such results also outperform existing Wi-Fi-based tracking solutions in terms of both dimensionality and accuracy.