WheelLoc: Practical and Accurate Localization for Wheeled Mobile Targets via Integrated Sensing and Communication

Practical and accurate localization systems are important to mobile targets that enable promising services such as navigation and augmented reality. With the proliferation of WiFi, existing WiFi-based localization systems have leveraged RSSI, fingerprints, landmarks, time of arrival, or angle of arrival to locate targets, while no related work pays attention to mobile targets themselves. For wheel-driven mobile targets, such as vehicles, bikes, and wheeled robots, we design and implement WheelLoc, a novel WiFi-based localization system leveraging the rotation of wheels. The specially designed WheelLoc hardware is cost-effective and self-powered with the composition of three commercial antennas and a solar cell, which is also easy to be installed on wheels. A hybrid WheelLoc algorithm is further proposed to realize accurate localization in diverse environments, whether the wheel of targets is static or mobile, indoor or outdoor, on flat or bumpy ground. The movements of individual antennas are exploited to emulate linear, cycloid, and circular antenna arrays using a new formulation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Extensive experiments are conducted on bikes in the real world. Performance results demonstrate that WheelLoc does not require any user interaction, yet achieves comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art localization systems using WiFi.