AIM: Acoustic Inertial Measurement for Indoor Drone Localization and Tracking
To address the challenge of precise UAV localization in GPS-denied indoor environments—particularly under non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions where existing methods rely on dedicated hardware or pre-deployed infrastructure—this paper proposes a markerless, infrastructure-free acoustic-inertial fusion localization paradigm. Leveraging only the intrinsic acoustic features of an onboard sound source and a distributed microphone array, the method enables real-time, high-accuracy motion tracking even in NLoS scenarios. We introduce an IQR-enhanced extended Kalman filter to robustly suppress outliers in acoustic source localization. Experimental results demonstrate that, in complex indoor settings, our approach achieves an average positioning error 46% lower than that of commercial UWB systems. Moreover, it consistently maintains sub-meter accuracy (<0.8 m) across arbitrarily scaled and configured spaces, significantly improving NLoS robustness and deployment flexibility.