Experimental Evaluation of a UWB-Based Cooperative Positioning System for Pedestrians in GNSS-Denied Environment

Abstract

Cooperative positioning (CP) utilises information sharing among multiple nodes to enable positioning in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. This paper reports the performance of a CP system for pedestrians using Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology inGNSS-denied environments. This data set was collected as part of a benchmarking measurementcampaign carried out at the Ohio State University in October 2017. Pedestrians were equippedwith a variety of sensors, including two different UWB systems, on a specially designed helmetserving as a mobile multi-sensor platform for CP. Different users were walking in stop-and-go modealong trajectories with predefined checkpoints and under various challenging environments. Inthe developed CP network, both Peer-to-Infrastructure (P2I) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) measurementsare used for positioning of the pedestrians. It is realised that the proposed system can achievedecimetre-level accuracies (on average, around 20 cm) in the complete absence of GNSS signals,provided that the measurements from infrastructure nodes are available and the network geometryis good. In the absence of these good conditions, the results show that the average accuracydegrades to meter level. Further, it is experimentally demonstrated that inclusion of P2P cooperativerange observations further enhances the positioning accuracy and, in extreme cases when only oneinfrastructure measurement is available, P2P CP may reduce positioning errors by up to 95%. Thecomplete test setup, the methodology for development, and data collection are discussed in thispaper. In the next version of this system, additional observations such as theWi-Fi, camera, and othersignals of opportunity will be included.