text: The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high localization accuracy.
  @cite_21: This paper presents a novel approach to placing access points (APs) in wireless local area networks (WLAN). Unlike the traditional methods focusing on coverage maximization, we investigate how to place APs from the perspective of an indoor location system. We present a framework for linking the placement of APs and the positioning performance. Our algorithm, namely maximizing SNR (signal-to-noise ratio), aims at choosing a proper set of APs' locations so that the signal is maximized and the noise is minimized simultaneously. The proposed algorithm regards the location discriminant information as the signal and the degree of unstable measurements as the noise. Such numerical values provide a good theoretical formulation to measure the influence of the AP deployment. In our location system, we utilize such SNR ratio to deploy APs so as to reduce the positioning errors. Our location system is developed in a real-world WLAN environment, where the realistic measurements were collected. The experimental results show that the positioning accuracy is improved based on our deployment approach in different scenarios.
summary: The above methods deal with optimal ways of inferring location given an existing network of beacons. The decision of how to distribute these beacons, however, is often made manually based on expert intuition. Automated placement methods are used rarely, and for very specific settings, such as RSS fingerprint-based localization @cite_21 . The most common of these is to ensure full coverage--- to ensure that all locations are within an acceptable range'' of at least one beacon, assuming this condition is sufficient to guarantee accurate localization.