Fly, Wake-up, Find: UAV-based Energy-efficient Localization for Distributed Sensor Nodes

Abstract

A challenging application scenario in the field of industrial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is the capability of a robot to find and query smart sensor nodes deployed at arbitrary locations in the mission area. This work explores the combination of different communication technologies, namely, Ultra-Wideband (UWB) and Wake-Up Radio (WUR), with a UAV that acts as a “ubiquitous local-host” of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). First, the UAV performs the localization of the sensor node via multiple UWB range measurements, and then it flies in its proximity to perform energy-efficient data acquisition. We propose an energy-efficient and accurate localization algorithm – based on multi-lateration – that is computationally inexpensive and robust to in-field noise. Aiming at minimizing the sensor node energy consumption, we also present a communication protocol that leverages WUR technology to minimize ON-time of the power-hungry UWB transceiver on the sensors. In-field experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves a sub-meter localization precision of the sensor nodes – i.e., down to 0.6m – using only three range measurements, and runs in 4ms on a low power microcontroller (ARM Cortex-M4F). Due to the presence of the WUR and the proposed lightweight algorithm, the entire localization-acquisition cycle requires only 31mJ on the sensor node. The approach is suitable for several emerging Industrial Internet of Things application scenarios where a mobile vehicle needs to estimate the location of static objects without any precise knowledge of their position.