Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Electrical Engineering

Major Professor

Aly Fathy

Committee Members

Paul Crilly, Marshall Pace

Abstract

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) wireless positioning systems have many advantages for track- ing and locating items in indoor environments. Surgical navigation and industrial process control are potential applications for high accuracy UWB localization systems with millimeter or sub-millimeter accuracy. I present improvements made to an existing high accuracy, multi-tag, UWB localization system. The goal of this thesis was to improve the multi-tag performance of this system while maintaining the high localization accuracy, and to utilize the UWB system for digital communications allowing the existing narrowband 2.4 GHz transceiver to be eliminated.

This thesis presents a proof-of-concept for a multi-tag, UWB localization system utilizing orthogonal time hopping multiple access (OTHMA). Asynchronous transmit- only UWB digital communication allows identification of tags without the use of a narrowband control channel, and time di↵erence of arrival (TDOA) accomplishes localization. A digital sampling circuit is used for both localization and digital communication. I address the inherent challenge of collisions in an asynchronous transmit-only system while maintaining high accuracy and high update rates. An experimental system was developed consisting of two base stations and two tags allowing measurement of 1-D localization accuracy along with system update rates. The experimental results for localization accuracy were equivalent to results from the existing system while update rates were improved by greater than 50%.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS