Design and implementation of a fully distributed ultrasonic positioning system

In the ubiquitous computing environment, the physical locations of persons and goods are extremely important information. In this paper, the design of a fully distributed localization system based on ultrasound, mainly for the indoor environment, is described. This system performs localization with as few positioning references as possible by an iterative technique. When such a localization method is used, deterioration of localization accuracy due to no-line-of-sight signals and to accumulated errors is a problem. In this paper, the resolution of these problems is discussed and system evaluation by implementation experiments is carried out. With 24 devices, localization with an accuracy of about 20 cm is demonstrated. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 90(6): 17– 26, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20249