Experimental Validation of Vehicle Positioning with Ultra-Wide Band Roadside Infrastructure

This paper focuses on precise vehicle localization and tracking in a race track, where centimeter-level accuracy is required for enabling advanced driving control functionalities such as in the context of autonomous vehicle racing. While global navigation satellite system (GNSS), augmented with real-time kinematic (RTK), is currently the most popular technology, we here propose the use of an Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) wireless network covering the road area to provide real-time accurate vehicle localization. This is motivated by the need to overcome the GNSS-RTK unavailability or outages with a complementary (or alternative) and reliable technology. To show the potential of network localization with large bandwidth and multi-antenna wireless systems, an UWB localization architecture based on commercial off-the-shelf devices is deployed in a race track scenario and used to collect raw location-related measurements. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is then applied to the time difference (TDoA) and angle of arrival (AoA) measurements collected by the UWB system, using an interactive multiple model (IMM) for modeling and tracking the vehicle along the track. The achieved results show that the position mismatch between the designed UKF+IMM positioning system and the GNSS-RTK solution is mostly below 30 cm, thus proving the potentialities of wideband smart road networks for vehicle positioning.