Real-Time Operating UWB Sensor System for Static Person Localization

Abstract

During the last decade, great attention has been devoted to static person (SP) localization by ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors. A number of promising applications of UWB sensors such as technological support at security operation and disaster events, or within ambient assisted living programs and biometric radars applied for a human being vital sign monitoring has been the most important motivation attracting the great interest of the researchers and high-tech companies. The state-of-the-art in this field has indicated, that the basic principles of SP localization by UWB sensors can be considered solved at the present time. On the other hand, the real-life scenarios are still bringing new, unsolved and challenging problems. In order to provide this technology to final users for everyday applications, these practical problems have to be identified and then solved. For their revealing, a real-time performing UWB sensor system testbed to be applied for SP localization (UWB - SP-LS) could be very useful experimental apparatus. It could be applied for the first experimental measurements for the considered applications. Then, the analyses of the measurement results can identify a new unexpected and/or unsolved problem and then define additional requirements for the development of final solutions. Motivated by these findings, we decided to develop such UWB - SP-LS at the Technical University of Košice. In this paper, we will describe shortly a basic concept of its hardware and software structure, and signal processing methods employed for SP localization. The UWB - SP-LS performance we will illustrate by some experimental results obtained for line-of-sight localization of two SPs.