Scale up to infinity: the UWB Indoor Global Positioning System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable UWB indoor positioning system that achieves high accuracy below 20 cm and can track unlimited assets simultaneously without reducing update rates.

Contribution

The paper presents an innovative UWB indoor GPS-like system with a novel mathematical model and DTDoA transmission, enabling scalable, high-accuracy asset tracking indoors.

Findings

Maximum error below 20 cm

Unlimited asset tracking without update rate loss

Effective uncertainty mitigation

Abstract

Determining assets position with high accuracy and scalability is one of the most investigated technology on the market. The accuracy provided by satellites-based positioning systems (i.e., GLONASS or Galileo) is not always sufficient when a decimeter-level accuracy is required or when there is the need of localising entities that operate inside indoor environments. Scalability is also a recurrent problem when dealing with indoor positioning systems. This paper presents an innovative UWB Indoor GPS-Like local positioning system able to tracks any number of assets without decreasing measurements update rate. To increase the system's accuracy the mathematical model and the sources of uncertainties are investigated. Results highlight how the proposed implementation provides positioning information with an absolute maximum error below 20 cm. Scalability is also resolved thanks to DTDoA transmission mechanisms not requiring an active role from the asset to be tracked.