Typical indoor environments contain multiple walls and obstacles consisting of different materials. As a result, current narrowband radio frequency (RF) indoor navigation systems cannot satisfy the challenging demands for most indoor applications. The RF ultra wideband (UWB) system is a promising technology for indoor localisation owing to its high bandwidth that permits mitigation of the multipath identification problem. This work proposes a novel UWB navigation system that permits accurate mobile robot (MR) navigation in indoor environments. The navigation system is composed of two sub-systems: the localisation system and the MR control system. The main contributions of this work are focused on estimation algorithm for localisation, digital implementation of transmitter and receiver and integration of both sub-systems that enable autonomous robot navigation. For sub-systems performance evaluation, statics and dynamics experiments were carried out which demonstrated that the proposed system reached an accuracy that outperforms traditional sensors technologies used in robot navigation, such as odometer and sonar.

No abstract

Accurate wireless timing synchronization has been an extremely important topic in wireless sensor networks, required in applications ranging from distributed beam forming to precision localization and navigation. However, it is very challenging to realize, in particular when the required accuracy should be better than the runtime between the nodes. This work presents, to our knowledge for the first time, an experimental timing synchronization scheme that achieves a timing accuracy better than 5-ns rms in a network with 4 nodes. The experimental hardware is built from commercially available components and based on software-defined ultra-wideband transceivers. The protocol for establishing the synchronization is based on our recently developed "blink" protocol that can scale from the small network demonstrated here to larger networks of hundreds or thousands of nodes.Index Terms-cooperative synchronization, network timing, ultra wide band, software defined radio.

In this work, a comparative study between an Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) localization system and a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is presented. Due to its high bandwidth and short pulses length, UWB potentially allows great accuracy in range measurements based on Time of Arrival (TOA) estimation. SLAM algorithms recursively estimates the map of an environment and the pose (position and orientation) of a mobile robot within that environment. The comparative study presented here involves the performance analysis of implementing in parallel an UWB localization based system and a SLAM algorithm on a mobile robot navigating within an environment. Real time results as well as error analysis are also shown in this work.

The R code of the method is available at https://github.com/ORCABioinfo/ORCAcode.