Experimental Evaluation of a UWB-Based Cooperative Positioning System for Pedestrians in GNSS-Denied Environment

Abstract

Cooperative positioning (CP) utilises information sharing among multiple nodes to enable positioning in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. This paper reports the performance of a CP system for pedestrians using Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology in GNSS-denied environments. This data set was collected as part of a benchmarking measurement campaign carried out at the Ohio State University in October 2017. Pedestrians were equipped with a variety of sensors, including two different UWB systems, on a specially designed helmet serving as a mobile multi-sensor platform for CP. Different users were walking in stop-and-go mode along trajectories with predefined checkpoints and under various challenging environments. In the developed CP network, both Peer-to-Infrastructure (P2I) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) measurements are used for positioning of the pedestrians. It is realised that the proposed system can achieve decimetre-level accuracies (on average, around 20 cm) in the complete absence of GNSS signals, provided that the measurements from infrastructure nodes are available and the network geometry is good. In the absence of these good conditions, the results show that the average accuracy degrades to meter level. Further, it is experimentally demonstrated that inclusion of P2P cooperative range observations further enhances the positioning accuracy and, in extreme cases when only one infrastructure measurement is available, P2P CP may reduce positioning errors by up to 95%. The complete test setup, the methodology for development, and data collection are discussed in this paper. In the next version of this system, additional observations such as the Wi-Fi, camera, and other signals of opportunity will be included.

An Indoor Low-Cost and High-Accuracy Localization Approach for AGVs

“…8 shows that the average error is about 20cm, and the maximum is about 40cm. The results are consistent with those in [14], [15]. It also shows the error is much smaller when samples are in [4000,7000] where the robot is nearly equally distant from transmitters.…”

“…Due to the signal attenuation of satellite systems, those systems cannot be used for indoor positioning [8], [9]. Recently, some UWB-based systems have been developed [10]- [15]. In [10], a technique is developed for achieving high accurate range data for UWB techniques.…”

“…In [12], an error calibration model of UWB systems is developed to achieve ranging accuracy in the order of cm. In [13]- [15], extended Kalman filter based approaches are developed for navigation, two for aerial vehicles and the other one for pedestrians. In this paper, an approach that uses the low cost UWB technology is developed.…”

A Benchmarking Measurement Campaign to Support Ubiquitous Localization in GNSS Denied and Indoor Environments

“…In these analyses trajectories of pedestrians walking around in an indoor office environment could be obtained on the decimeter-level using UWB and with Wi-Fi fingerprinting matching success rates of around 97% were achieved for assigning the user to the correct cell, i.e., either a room or section of the hallway. Further data processing and analyses of a CL solution is currently in progress and the results for UWB navigation presented in Gabela et al (2019) indicate significant performance improvements of users navigating within a neighborhood. Positioning accuracies on the decimetre level are achieved for two moving users even at the end of the hallway where the geometry of the range measurement to the anchors is not the best.…”

Indoor Navigation and Mapping: Performance Analysis of Uwb-Based Platform Positioning

“…Furthermore, most of the commercial UWB positioning systems are based just on the use of a set of UWB devices fixed at known positions, typically named anchors, but it is clear that communication and relative range measurements between moving devices can also be exploited for improving users' position estimates in a cooperative positioning strategy (Seco, Jiménez, 2018, Kealy et al, 2015, Gabela et al, 2019.…”