UWB-based elliptical target localization in an indoor environment

Abstract

Geometrically driven Ultra-Wideband (UWB) based approach to indoor localization is seemingly defined on the assumption that multipath signals have been resolved in a pre-processing step. This assumed multipath resolving ensures that the multipath propagation scenario expected with any indoor signal propagation, is downgraded to a two-path one which inadvertently oversimplifies the underlying localization problem. In this work, we propose a full solution which consists of a pre-localization step and the actual localization task. In a previous work, we presented a pre-processing or pre-localization step which makes use of electrically-driven reflection properties of UWB signals to extract information from the reflected signals in the multipath environment; and ultimately reduce the multipath propagation scenario into a two-path one based on these extracted information. As a direct consequence, a way is paved for geometrical approaches which are usually driven by either the Time of Arrival (TOA), Angle of Arrival (AOA) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) position estimation method. In this work, we show that by carefully considering the inherent properties of the UWB technology, UWB based 2D indoor localization can be efficiently achieved by using just two receivers and one transmitter which contrasts current geometric approaches which require at least three receivers and one transmitter for localization.