UWB-based Local Positioning System: From a small-scale experimental platform to a large-scale deployable system

A few years ago an experimental platform was designed and built in order to demonstrate the feasibility of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology applied to indoor positioning. this small-scale demonstrator proved to be a valuable research tool with the flexibility to study, test and assess the performance of various system architectures and signal processing algorithms. based on this successful experience, the current follow-up r&d project aims to extend the research to other topics by pursuing two main objectives: (a) designing and building a large-scale deployable UWB-based local positioning system (lps), including its installation, calibration and operational testing in a real industrial environment; (b) conceiving and developing application specific integrated circuits (asics) to target cost-competitive solutions. this paper addresses the main design issues analyzed during the requirements definition phase for this large-scale deployable lps, considering that the new system should inherit whenever possible the design features already present in the small-scale experimental platform.