SLAM-Based Joint Calibration of Differential RSS Sensor Array and Source Localization

Sensor arrays generating differential received signal strength (DRSS) measurements have found many applications in robotics. However, accurate calibration of these sensor arrays remains a challenge. Most existing methods are impractical in that they assume to know signal source positions or certain parameters (i.e., path loss exponent), and try to estimate the others. In this paper, we adopt graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) as a general framework for jointly estimating the source positions and parameters of the DRSS sensor array. Our contributions are twofold. On the one hand, by using a Fisher information matrix approach, we conduct a systematic observability analysis of the corresponding SLAM setup for the calibration problem. On the other hand, we propose an effective procedure to select the initial value which is fed to Levenberg-Marquardt iterations for further improving optimization accuracy and convergence. Extensive simulation and hardware experiments show that the proposed method renders high-quality calibration results. All the codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/SUSTech2022/DRSS-sensor-array-calibration.