Swadloon: Direction Finding and Indoor Localization Using Acoustic Signal by Shaking Smartphones

We propose an accurate acoustic direction finding scheme, Swadloon, according to the arbitrary pattern of phone shaking in a rough horizontal plane. Swadloon leverages sensors of the smartphone without the requirement of any specialized devices. Our Swadloon design exploits a key observation: the relative displacement and velocity of the phone-shaking movement corresponds to the subtle phase and frequency shift of the Doppler effects experienced in the received acoustic signal by the phone. Swadloon tracks the displacement of smartphone relative to the acoustic direction with the resolution less than 1 millimeter. The direction is then obtained by combining the velocity from the displacement with the one from the inertial sensors. Major challenges in implementing Swadloon are to measure the displacement precisely and to estimate the shaking velocity accurately when the speed of phone-shaking is low and changes arbitrarily. We propose rigorous methods to address these challenges, and apply Swadloon to several case studies: Phone-to-Phone direction finding, indoor localization and tracking. Our extensive experiments show that the mean error of direction finding is around 2.1 degree within the range of 32 m. For indoor localization, the 90-percentile errors are under 0.92 m. For real-time tracking, the errors are within 0.4 m for walks of 51 m.