3D Indoor Positioning of UAVs with Spread Spectrum Ultrasound and Time-of-Flight Cameras
1
Sensory System Research Group, University of Extremadura, 06006 Badajoz, Spain
2
Department of Electronics, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2018, 18(1), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18010089
Received: 2 November 2017 / Revised: 15 December 2017 / Accepted: 27 December 2017 / Published: 30 December 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors and Sensing in Indoor Localization, Tracking, Navigation and Activity Monitoring)
This work proposes the use of a hybrid acoustic and optical indoor positioning system for the accurate 3D positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The acoustic module of this system is based on a Time-Code Division Multiple Access (T-CDMA) scheme, where the sequential emission of five spread spectrum ultrasonic codes is performed to compute the horizontal vehicle position following a 2D multilateration procedure. The optical module is based on a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) camera that provides an initial estimation for the vehicle height. A recursive algorithm programmed on an external computer is then proposed to refine the estimated position. Experimental results show that the proposed system can increase the accuracy of a solely acoustic system by 70–80% in terms of positioning mean square error.
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Keywords:
acoustic positioning system (APS); unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV); time-code division multiple access (T-CDMA)
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MDPI and ACS Style
Paredes, J.A.; Álvarez, F.J.; Aguilera, T.; Villadangos, J.M. 3D Indoor Positioning of UAVs with Spread Spectrum Ultrasound and Time-of-Flight Cameras. Sensors 2018, 18, 89.
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