An Ultrasonic Indoor Positioning System for Harsh Environments

There is a need for robust positioning systems that can operate in noisy environments such as in hospitals. Although there have been several systems proposed in literature, most systems are aimed at conventional environments such as office buildings or shopping malls. In this paper, a robust ultrasound based positioning system aimed specifically at noisy environments is developed. The system consists of nodes equipped with RF transceivers and ultrasound transducers and estimates the location of mobile tags using time-of-arrival. It is shown that the accuracy attained is better than 35 cm at an update rate of 3 seconds in both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions.

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