Localization of Terrestrial Objects Using a Drone with UWB Antennas

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potentials for several important applications, such as search and rescue and structural health monitoring. An important requirement for these applications is the ability to accurately localize objects, such as sensors or ``smart-things'', equipped with wireless communication capability. However, most previous works in this area neglect the unavoidable errors that are involved in the localization process, thus resulting in poor performance in practice. In this thesis, we express the measurement error on the ground as a function of the rolling, altitude, and instrumental precision provided by the hardware on the drone, in our case, the Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (IR-UWB) technology. Then, we study many sensor localization techniques that replace the expensive and fixed anchors with a single drone equipped with omnidirectional and directional antennas. Finally, the performance of our solutions, evaluated in terms of the static path length and of the achieved precision, are validated by simulation study.