Signal architecture for a Distributed Magnetic Local Positioning System

This paper presents the Distributed Magnetic Local Positioning System, which can be used by a mobile robot to measure absolute position and attitude, even in the cluttered environment of an office building or warehouse. The system is based on extremely low frequency magnetic fields, which have excellent characteristics for penetrating line-of-sight obstructions. Multiple beacons distributed throughout a building are used to generate the fields using an orthogonal set of pseudorandom codes. This signal architecture results in low overall frequency content, reducing eddy field noise, while maintaining good performance versus additive white Gaussian noise.