Tracking Feasibility of UWB Positioning System for Lighter-than-Air Indoor Robot Navigation

Abstract

Due to increasing use of flying robots indoors, it is important to safely navigate them without collision. The basic necessity for safe navigation is to first locate these flying robots. For this sake, recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) technology caught attention because of its low price, long range, and multi-agent tracking. This paper presents the tracking feasibility of UWB positioning system for a lighter-than-air indoor robot (LAIDR) navigation application. At beginning, the LAIDR's hardware is described including the actuating mechanism and followed up by UWB sensors' infrastructure. After that, the three layers' data framework is presented to share the external sensory data for LAIDR's indoor navigation task. Finally, a real-time experiment comprised of a line navigation is conducted to evaluate tracking feasibility of UWB positioning system for LAIDR navigation. Where a laser scanner is adopted as a reference instrument for comparative validation. The comparative results confirm that UWB positioning system is a feasible indoor tracking option with acceptable accuracy for performing LAIDR navigation inside a wider space.