UWB-Based Indoor Localization: How to Optimally Design the Operating Setup?

Localizing objects in indoor environments with anchor-based systems poses several challenges to be faced. The main one is the design phase. What is the minimum number of anchors to be adopted? What is the optimal placement of the anchors in the operating domain? These are typical issues that need to be solved in this stage. Such issue is generally addressed by several experimental tests, imposing high costs both in the required large amounts of time and in the use of devices. In addition, sometimes the experiments will not warrant to identify the optimal design solution. In this work, a black-box design tool is proposed, able to manage different environments, in terms of domain size, maximum number of available anchors, device metrological features, and target performance. Such an approach, to be effective, needs a preliminary validation versus experimental results to make the future performance predictions reliable and avoid unexpected localization accuracy degradation. For this reason, the presented work adopts a side-by-side development, by evaluating results’ compatibility, in static and dynamic contexts, before addressing further and more complex analyses relying on the design tool only. Such a comparison proves the goodness of the developed design tool, and the outcomes allow an accurate localization system design by finding anchors’ placement solutions with the minimum computational burden.