Section: Application Domains

Localisation, navigation and tracking

See 7.1.

Among the many application domains of particle methods, or interacting Monte Carlo methods, ASPI has decided to focus on applications in localisation (or positioning), navigation and tracking  [46], [39], which already covers a very broad spectrum of application domains. The objective here is to estimate the position (and also velocity, attitude, etc.) of a mobile object, from the combination of different sources of information, including

• a prior dynamical model of typical evolutions of the mobile, such as inertial estimates and prior model for inertial errors,

• measurements provided by sensors,

• and possibly a digital map providing some useful feature (terrain altitude, power attenuation, etc.) at each possible position.

In some applications, another useful source of information is provided by

• a map of constrained admissible displacements, for instance in the form of an indoor building map,

which particle methods can easily handle (map-matching). This Bayesian dynamical estimation problem is also called filtering, and its numerical implementation using particle methods, known as particle filtering, has been introduced by the target tracking community  [45], [56], which has already contributed to many of the most interesting algorithmic improvements and is still very active, and has found applications in

target tracking, integrated navigation, points and / or objects tracking in video sequences, mobile robotics, wireless communications, ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, sensor networks, etc.

ASPI is contributing (or has contributed recently) to several applications of particle filtering in positioning, navigation and tracking, such as geolocalisation and tracking in a wireless network, terrain–aided navigation, and data fusion for indoor localisation.