UWB-based Local Positioning System: from a small-scale Experimental Platform to a large-scale Deployable System

A few years ago an experimental platform was designed and built in order to demonstrate the feasibility of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology applied to indoor positioning. This small-scale demonstrator proved to be a valuable research tool with the flexibility to study, test and assess the performance of various system architectures and signal processing algorithms. Based on this successful experience, the current follow-up R&D project aims to extend the research to other topics by pursuing two main objectives: a) designing and building a large-scale deployable UWB-based Local Positioning System (LPS), including its installation, calibration and operational testing in a real industrial environment; b) conceiving and developing Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to target cost-competitive solutions. This paper addresses the main design issues analyzed during the requirements definition phase for this large-scale deployable LPS, considering that the new system should inherit whenever possible the design features already present in the small-scale experimental platform.