Scale up to infinity: the UWB Indoor Global Positioning System
This addresses the need for decimeter-level accuracy and scalability in indoor environments, such as for asset tracking, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing UWB and DTDoA technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving high-accuracy and scalable indoor positioning by presenting a UWB-based system that tracks unlimited assets without reducing update rates, achieving a maximum error below 20 cm.
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.