Self-Weighted Multilateration for Indoor Positioning Systems

The paper proposes an improved method for calculating the position of a movable tag whose distance to a (redundant) set of fixed beacons is measured by some suitable physical principle (typically ultra wide band or ultrasound propagation). The method is based on the multilateration technique, where the contribution of each individual beacon is weighed on the basis of a recurring, self-supported calibration of the measurement repeatability of each beacon at a given distance range. The work outlines the method and its implementation, and shows the improvement in measurement quality with respect to the results of a commercial Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) system when tested on the same set of raw beacon-to-tag distances. Two versions of the algorithm are proposed: one-dimensional, or isotropic, and 3D. With respect to the standard approach, the isotropic solution managed to reduce the maximum localization error by around 25%, with a maximum error of 0.60 m, while the 3D version manages to improve even further the localization accuracy, with a maximum error of 0.45 m.