NM-LUD: A NLOS Mitigation Method with Low-cost UWB Devices for Indoor Positioning

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a popular technology for indoor positioning. However, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation caused by human occlusion dramatically affects the accuracy of UWB-based indoor positioning. Most of the existing works focused on mitigating NLOS errors in the scenarios with building structure occlusion, but the NLOS mitigation under human occlusion has not been well addressed. To this end, this paper aims to mitigate the NLOS impact of human occlusion, and then proposes a method of NLOS mitigation to reduce NLOS ranging errors under human occlusion with low-cost UWB devices (i.e., NM-LUD). It takes a set of signal features extracted from low-cost devices as input, calculates their weights and mitigates the ranging error based on the features' weights. Experiment results on the two data sets collected by LinkTrack S and UML1 UWB devices show that the method reduces ranging error from 0.9009 m to 0.1435 m (about by 84.07%) and from 0.7466 m to 0.0792 m (about by 89.39%) respectively, which greatly mitigates the influence of NLOS caused by human occlusion.