Advancements in Industrial RTLSs: A Technical Review of UWB Localization Devices Emphasizing Antennas for Enhanced Accuracy and Range

Abstract

Over the past few years, the Internet of Things paradigm has brought renewed significant interest to indoor positioning, tracking, and localization topics, principally since real-time locating technology allows a reference node to infer the position of tagged target nodes, creating the opportunity for millions of object-to-object awareness applications. This study first presents an overview of positioning localization techniques and discusses the use of ultra-wide bandwidth technology for complex environment monitoring, followed by consideration of the error sources that are present in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios between a reader and a tag. A technical review of the available industrial and commercial UWB real-time locating transceivers (RTLSs) is presented, with a focus on the frontend antennas that are integrated in these systems to establish the needed wireless communication for positioning. Then, the different characteristics of these antennas are summarized and discussed, along with their impact on the localization performance in terms of the reading range, position information accuracy, object-orientation-independent localization, and multipath mitigation. Solutions are suggested to achieve antenna-based improvements to the performance of RTLSs.