Acoustic Localization without Synchronization

In this paper, we design and implement an asynchronous multi-device acoustic localization system. Although the relative position and distance can be useful to many applications such as drone swarming, not much research has been conducted on the field. As synchronizing multiple devices can be difficult or even impossible with certain hardware, we devised an asynchronous algorithm that provides a high accuracy ranging and localization. A high performance ranging and localization technique that uses a relatively minor source, sound, can provide a new set of characteristics. Also, the proposed design uses multiple devices to enhance the performance of each and all of the ranging results. Our proposed algorithm can work on most commercial devices that have acoustic capability of emitting a specific sound and recording general sound. In this paper, the architecture of the entire system, the description of the algorithms, and the evaluation of the system are elaborated.