In order to obtain very precise measurements of the position of agents located at a considerable distance using a sensor system based on position sensitive detectors (PSD), it is necessary to analyze and mitigate the factors that generate substantial errors in the system’s response. These sources of error can be divided into electronic and geometric factors. The former stem from the nature and construction of the PSD as well as the performance, tolerances and electronic response of the system, while the latter are related to the sensor’s optical system. Here, we focus solely on the electrical effects, since the study, analysis and correction of these are a prerequisite for subsequently addressing geometric errors. A simple calibration method is proposed, which considers PSD response, component tolerances, temperature variations, signal frequency used, signal to noise ratio (SNR), suboptimal operational amplifier parameters, and analog to digital converter (ADC) quantitation SNRQ, etc. Following an analysis of these effects and calibration of the sensor, it was possible to correct the errors, thus rendering the effects negligible, as reported in the results section.

Here, we propose a mathematical model and a calibration procedure for a PSD (position sensitive device) sensor equipped with an optical system, to enable accurate measurement of the angle of arrival of one or more beams of light emitted by infrared (IR) transmitters located at distances of between 4 and 6 m. To achieve this objective, it was necessary to characterize the intrinsic parameters that model the system and obtain their values. This first approach was based on a pin-hole model, to which system nonlinearities were added, and this was used to model the points obtained with the nA currents provided by the PSD. In addition, we analyzed the main sources of error, including PSD sensor signal noise, gain factor imbalances and PSD sensor distortion. The results indicated that the proposed model and method provided satisfactory calibration and yielded precise parameter values, enabling accurate measurement of the angle of arrival with a low degree of error, as evidenced by the experimental results.

In this paper, we propose a model to characterize Infrared (IR) signal reflections on any kind of surface material, together with a simplified procedure to compute the model parameters. The model works within the framework of Local Positioning Systems (LPS) based on IR signals (IR-LPS) to evaluate the behavior of transmitted signal Multipaths (MP), which are the main cause of error in IR-LPS, and makes several contributions to mitigation methods. Current methods are based on physics, optics, geometry and empirical methods, but these do not meet our requirements because of the need to apply several different restrictions and employ complex tools. We propose a simplified model based on only two reflection components, together with a method for determining the model parameters based on 12 empirical measurements that are easily performed in the real environment where the IR-LPS is being applied. Our experimental results show that the model provides a comprehensive solution to the real behavior of IR MP, yielding small errors when comparing real and modeled data (the mean error ranges from 1% to 4% depending on the environment surface materials). Other state-of-the-art methods yielded mean errors ranging from 15% to 40% in test measurements.

Here, we present an indoor positioning system (IPS) for detecting mobile agents based on a single Position Sensitive Device sensor (PSD) sited in the environment and InfraRed Emitter Diode (IRED) located on mobile agents. The main goal of the work is to develop an alternative IPS to other sensing technologies, cheaper, easier to install and with a low computational load to obtain a high rate of measurements per second. The proposed IPS has the capacity to accurately determine 3D position from the angle of arrival (AoA) of the signal received at the PSD sensor. In this first approach to the method, the agents are considered to move along a plane. We propose two alternatives for determining position: in one, tones are emitted on a frequency unique to each transmitter, while in the other, sequences are emitted.The paper proposes and set up a very simple and easy to deploy system capable of performing 3D positioning with a single analog sensor, obtaining a high accurate positioning and a reduced execution time for the signal processing. The low computational load of the IPS makes it possible to obtain a very high position update rate (more than 100 times per second), yielding millimetric accuracies.

Here, we propose a model to determine the effect of multipath in indoor environments when the shape and characteristics of the environment are known. The main paper goal is to model the multipath signal formation to solve, as much as possible, the negative effects in light communications, as well as the indoor positioning errors due to this phenomenon when using optical signals. The methodology followed was: analyze the multipath phenomenon, establish a theoretical approach and propose different models to characterize the behavior of the channel, emitter and receiver. The channel impulse response and received signal strength are obtained from different proposed algorithms. We also propose steps for implementing a numerical procedure to calculate the effects of these multipaths using information that characterizes the environment, transmitter and receiver and their corresponding positions. In addition, the results of an empirical test in a controlled environment are compared with those obtained using the model, in order to validate the latter. The results may largely vary with respect to the cell size used to discretize the environment. We have concluded that a cell size whose side is 20-times smaller than the minimum distance between emitter and receiver (i.e., 10 cm × 10 cm for a 2-m distance) provides almost identical results between the empirical tests and the proposed model, with an affordable computational load.