Localization within Hostile Indoor Environments for Emergency Responders

Abstract

Recent advances in techniques to improve indoor localization accuracy for personnel and asset tracking challenges has enabled wide-spread adoption within the retail, manufacturing, and health care industries. Most currently deployed systems use distance estimates from known reference locations to localize a person or asset using geometric lateration techniques. The distances are determined using one of many radio frequency (RF) based ranging techniques. Unfortunately, such techniques are susceptible to interference and multipath propagation caused by obstructions within buildings. Because range inaccuracies from known locations can directly lead to incorrect position estimates, these systems often require careful upfront deployment design to account for site-specific interference sources. However, the upfront system deployment requirements necessary to achieve high positioning accuracy with RF-based ranging systems makes the use of such systems impractical, particularly for structures constructed of challenging materials or dense configurations. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the accuracy and precision of alternative RF-based devices within a range of indoor spaces composed of different materials and sizes. These spaces range from large open areas such as gymnasiums to confined engineering labs of traditional buildings as well as training buildings at the local Fire Department Training Facility. Our goal is to identify the impact of alternative RF-based systems on localization accuracy and precision specifically for first responders that are called upon to traverse structures composed of different materials and configurations. Consequently, in this study we have specifically chosen spaces that are likely to be encountered by firefighters during building fires or emergency medical responses. Moreover, many of these indoor spaces can be considered hostile using RF-based ranging techniques. We built prototype wearable localization edge devices designed for first responders and characterize both ranging and localization accuracy and precision using alternative transceivers including Bluetooth Low Energy, 433 MHz, 915 MHz, and ultra-wide band. Our results show that in hostile environments, using ultra-wide band transceivers for localization consistently outperforms the alternatives in terms of precision and accuracy.