Assessment of UWB for ubiquitous positioning and navigation

The University of Nottingham has purchased a set of more than 20 Ultra Wideband (UWB) sensors from Thales (UK) to enhance its ubiquitous positioning and navigation capacity. A scalable indoor testing facility has been set up recently and one of these testing scenarios consists of 8 fixed base stations and a few rover units onboard the moving objects, to simulate different applications. Two tests that lasted one week each have been carried out to identify the UWB error sources, develop and test the newly developed processing algorithms, assess the achievable positioning and navigation performance that include kinematic positioning accuracy, continuity and system robustness. This paper presents the initial research results and findings and compares the advantages and disadvantages of UWB indoor positioning and navigation with other methods. Lessons learnt from organizing these tests are also presented and the future research exploration is briefly discussed.