Automated Testbed for Repeatable Evaluation of Ultra-Wideband Localization Performance

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated, repeatable testbed infrastructure for evaluating Ultra-Wideband localization systems, integrating environmental control, device management, and precise timing to facilitate complex wireless experiments.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, fully automated testbed built on ROS 2 that manages UWB devices, environmental factors, and measurements for repeatable localization testing.

Findings

Achieves 4.8 mm positional repeatability

Provides sub-1 ms timing accuracy with NTP synchronization

Enables automated, complex measurement campaigns

Abstract

Testing Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems is challenging, as multiple devices need to coordinate over lossy links and the systems' behavior is influenced by timing, synchronization, and environmental factors. Traditional testing is often insufficient to capture these complex interactions, highlighting the need for an overarching testbed infrastructure that can manage devices, control the environment, and make measurements and test scenarios repeatable. In this work, we present a highly automated testbed architecture built on Robot Operating System Version 2, integrating device management with environmental control and measurement systems. It includes an optical reference system, a controllable Autonomous Guided Vehicle to position devices within the environment, and time synchronization via Network Time Protocol (NTP). The testbed achieves a Root Mean Squared Error of 4.8 mm for positioning repeatability and 0.493$\deg$ for the orientation, and our NTP-based synchronization approach achieves a timing accuracy of below 1 ms. All testbed functionality can be controlled remotely through simple Python scripts to allow automated orchestration tasks such as conducting complex measurement scenarios. We demonstrate this with a measurement campaign on UWB localization, showing how it enables repeatable, observable, and fully controlled wireless experiments.