The design and application of an UWB-based indoor positioning system

In this study, an indoor positioning system was designed by using the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology as the baseline. First of all, the existing indoor positioning systems-RFID, UWB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth- were examined. When the differences and the advantages of the existing systems were taken into consideration, the UWB technology was selected and the study was conducted by taking this technology as the reference. A positioning system structure was developed by using the measurement method (TDoA) and positioning estimation method (Trilateration) which are using by indoor positioning systems. Then the primary needs in the design of the prototype were identified. After examining the modules which support the UWB technology, the DWM1000 module of the Decawave brand was selected and used in the circuit. While Arduino Pro Mini 3V3 module was used in the processor, ESP8266 module was selected as the Wi-Fi module. After designing the prototype circuit, the researcher had it produced by using these three modules. After assembling the PCB circuits taken from production, they were tested. An indoor positioning system was designed with three anchor which were formed and a target circuit by using trilateration method. These distance data coming from circuit of the three anchors were sent to the server part which was written in Python thanks to the Wi-Fi module and several results were obtained after being processed by the Matlab engine which runs on Python. First the system performance tests were carried out and then the results were obtained and the system was optimized for its best performance. As the last step, the system was performed in two different area. First area is a test area, the statistics of the density in a test platform which was divided into different areas were calculated with the algorithms developed by the researcher. Second area is a real environment, mapping of the environment was tested in addition to first area tests.