Wireless Indoor Positioning With Vertically Uniform Alternating Magnetic Fields

With the growing demands for localizing humans and mobile service robots, wireless indoor positioning has become a hot topic. Due to inevitable multipath scatterings in indoor spaces, technical challenges still exist. In this paper, we propose a new solution based on vertically uniform alternating magnetic fields. Such fields can be established by long coils driven by watt-level alternating currents with hertz-scale frequencies. Detected by commercial magnetic sensors, the coexisting dual-frequency magnetic fields are able to distribute in indoor spaces with tens of square meters. With 10 4 -km-scale wavelengths, indoor obstacles can be considered as negligible Rayleigh scatters, and thus, this method is robust in complex indoor environments. Insensitive to height, the vertically polarized magnetic fields can be conveniently detected by existing smartphones, implying a human-oriented WIP based on smartphones.