Ubiquitous Indoor Mapping Using Mobile Radio Tomography

The demand for real-time and accurate mapping is ubiquitous, particularly in complex indoor settings. While SLAM-based methods are popular, Radio Tomographic Imaging (RTI) offers an essential set of advantages, including mapping inaccessible or enclosed spaces, shorter scanning trajectories, or even identifying material properties of structures on the map. However, existing RTI systems typically depend on pre-deployed, precisely calibrated infrastructure with ample computing power, making it challenging to deploy in a ubiquitous setting. We design UbiqMap, a lightweight RTI-based end-to-end system capable of mapping indoor spaces in real-time, with minimal to zero reliance over pre-deployed infrastructure. We evaluate the performance of UbiqMap in various scenarios, including two real deployments - a moderately complex residential apartment (800 sq. ft) and a large building foyer area (3000 sq. ft) and a few simulated scenarios. We demonstrate how UbiqMap can benefit over traditional SLAM-based techniques in specific contexts and advocate the fusion of RTI methods with SLAM to improve future mapping technologies. Overall, UbiqMap improves the quality of the estimated map by 30%–40% over the state-of-the-art with equivalent resource availability.