Investigation of High-Accuracy Indoor 3-D Positioning Using UWB Technology

There are many challenges in building an ultra-wideband (UWB) indoor local positioning system for high-accuracy applications. These challenges include reduced accuracy due to multipath interference, sampling rate limitations, tag synchronization, and antenna phase-center variation. Each of these factors must be addressed to achieve millimeter or sub-millimeter accuracy. The developed system architecture is presented where a 300-ps Gaussian pulse modulates an 8-GHz carrier signal and is transmitted through an omni-directional UWB antenna. Receiver-side peak detection, a low-cost subsequential-sampling mixer utilizing a direct digital synthesizer, high fidelity 10-MHz crystals, and Vivaldi phase-center calibration are utilized to mitigate these challenging problems. Synchronized and unsynchronized experimental results validated with a sub-millimeter accurate optical tracking system are presented with a detailed discussion of various system errors.