Experimental measurements of the accuracy of commercial UWB real-time localization systems and proposal of new collision avoidance algorithms for industrial applications

A typical problem in industrial applications is the localisation and tracking of goods in a warehouse as well as the monitoring of machines moving along production lines. The emerging ultra wideband (UWB) technology is a very promising solution since it can be used in hostile environment where traditional radio frequency systems have problems to work because of the severe multipath effect. In this paper exhaustive experimental measurements of a UWB real-time localisation system in industrial environments are presented. The accuracy of the positioning system with static and moving objects and persons is investigated. The accuracy is tested by changing the localisation technique (ToA, TDoA, TDoA+AoA), the cell shape and dimensions, the heights of the sensors in the cell, etc. The accuracy is measured both when the tag is hooked on a metallic object and when it is worn by a person. Finally, in this paper two new algorithms to avoid collisions between moving objects are proposed.