Combining Dilution of Precision and Kalman Filtering for UWB Positioning in a Narrow Space

Affected by the spatial environment, the accuracy and stability of ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning in a narrow space are significantly lower than those in the general indoor environment, which limits navigation and positioning services in a complex scene. To improve the positioning accuracy and stability of a narrow space, this study proposed a positioning algorithm by combining Kalman filter (KF) and dilution of precision (DOP). Firstly, we calculated the DOP values of the target narrow space by changing the location of the test nodes throughout the space. Secondly, the initial coordinate values of the test nodes were calculated by the weighted least squares (WLS) positioning algorithm and were used as the observation values of KF. Finally, the DOP values were adaptively introduced into KF to update the coordinates of the nodes to be tested. The proposed algorithm was tested in two narrow scenes with different length-width ratios. The experimental results showed that the DOP values of the narrow space were much higher than that of the wide space. Furthermore, even if the ranging error was low, the positioning error was high in the narrow space. The proposed fusion positioning algorithm reported a higher positioning accuracy in the narrow space, and the higher DOP values of the scene, the greater the accuracy improvement of the algorithm. This study reveals that no matter how the base stations are configured, the DOP values of the narrow space are much higher than that of the wide space, thus causing larger positioning errors. The proposed positioning algorithm can effectively suppress the positioning error caused by the narrow spatial structure, so as to improve the positioning accuracy and stability.