Simultaneous localization and mapping with power network electromagnetic field

Various sensing modalities have been exploited for indoor location sensing, each of which has well understood limitations, however. This paper presents a first systematic study on using the electromagnetic field (EMF) induced by a building’s electric power network for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A basis of this work is a measurement study showing that the power network EMF sensed by either a customized sensor or smartphone’s microphone as a side- channel sensor is spatially distinct and temporally stable. Based on this, we design a SLAM approach that can reliably detect loop closures based on EMF sensing results. With the EMF feature map constructed by SLAM, we also design an efficient online localization scheme for resource-constrained mobiles. Evaluation in three indoor spaces shows that the power network EMF is a promising modality for location sensing on mobile devices, which is able to run in real time and achieve sub-meter accuracy