Evaluation of Range Error Calibration Models for Indoor UWB Positioning Applications

Recent improvements in the field of wireless technologies has led to an increase of available tools for Location Based Services (LBS). Modern indoor LBS applications continually raise the bar of requirements for the employed positioning technology and Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) ranging has become relevant by providing adequate performance. UWB employs modulated impulse signals for achieving ranging accuracies in the order of cm offering increased capabilities compared to other Radio-Frequency ranging methods. In order for the UWB systems to function reliably in complex indoor environments, error mitigation techniques are employed based on ranging error modelling methods. In this study, a commercial UWB system (Time Domain
^®
) is employed for the development of error calibration models based on data collected in an indoor office environment. Three calibration methods are examined both for static and kinematic test scenarios. An overall improvement of 32%-86% is demonstrated for the static UWB ranges data while a 74% improvement on kinematic data results in a mean trajectory accuracy of 9 cm.