Soft Multipath Information-Based UWB Tracking in Cluttered Scenarios: Preliminaries and Validations

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel UWB tracking method that exploits multipath reflections in cluttered environments to improve localization accuracy, reducing the need for many anchors and outperforming traditional approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a multipath-assisted probabilistic UWB tracking algorithm that models soft multipath information, leveraging reflections to enhance localization in challenging scenarios.

Findings

Achieves 46.4 cm and 33.1 cm 90th percentile errors with 3 and 4 anchors.

Outperforms conventional methods by over 61.8% in cluttered environments.

Effectively utilizes multipath reflections to reduce anchor requirements.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate ultra-wideband (UWB) localization and tracking in cluttered environments. Instead of mitigating the multipath, we exploit the specular reflections to enhance the localizability and improve the positioning accuracy. With the assistance of the multipath, it is also possible to achieve localization purposes using fewer anchors or when the line-of-sight propagations are blocked. Rather than using single-value distance, angle, or Doppler estimates for the localization, we model the likelihoods of both the line-of-sight and specular multipath components, namely soft multipath information, and propose the multipath-assisted probabilistic UWB tracking algorithm. Experimental results in a cluttered industrial scenario show that the proposed algorithm achieves 46.4 cm and 33.1 cm 90th percentile errors in the cases of 3 and 4 anchors, respectively, which outperforms conventional methods with more than 61.8% improvement given fewer anchors and strong multipath effect.