Performance Characterization of a Commercial UWB Localization Relative to Low-Cost Vision-Based Tracking

An ultra-wideband (UWB) Anchor–Tag commercial sensor system used for positioning is characterized herein, against an image-processing based positioning system used as a ground truth. The UWB consists of a single anchor that measures the angle of arrival (AoA) and distance to the moving tag. The driftless camera-based positioning system requires a series of complex operations, among camera calibration, image processing and network transmission delay estimation, and time alignment with the analyzed UWB measurement system. For the UWB system, the accuracy, precision, resolution, covered area, and error-vs-distance dependence are measured on several collected trajectories, both stationary and in motion. Several filtering solutions are proposed to improve these metrics that are affected by some faulty measurements, to subsequently validate the overall performance. The condition monitoring is verified both in offline and in online processing modes, using these filtering solutions. Our approach is black-box and does not use additional information except for raw position data. The importance and feasibility of UWB systems for indoor or outdoor localization is demonstrated, as well as some caveats and possible mitigation strategies.