Indoor Positioning Using Ultrawideband and Inertial Measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach to combine measurements from inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes) with time-of-arrival measurements from an ultrawideband (UWB) system for indoor positioning. Our algorithm uses a tightly coupled sensor fusion approach, where we formulate the problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem that is solved using an optimization approach. It is shown to lead to accurate 6-D position and orientation estimates when compared to reference data from an independent optical tracking system. To be able to obtain position information from the UWB measurements, it is imperative that accurate estimates of the UWB receivers' positions and their clock offsets are available. Hence, we also present an easy-to-use algorithm to calibrate the UWB system using a maximum-likelihood (ML) formulation. Throughout this work, the UWB measurements are modeled by a tailored heavy-tailed asymmetric distribution to account for measurement outliers. The heavy-tailed asymmetric distribution works well on experimental data, as shown by analyzing the position estimates obtained using the UWB measurements via a novel multilateration approach.