Accessible ultrasonic positioning

The installation and designing of ultrasonic positioning systems, is discussed. System designers consider factors which include device cost, setup complexity, performance, and power consumption. Many positioning systems are range-based as they use distance measurements for position calculations. Range-based systems differ in the type of architecture and the physical medium used to measure distances. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a range-based system and its coverage is wide but limited to areas directly in the line of sight to multiple satellites. GPS satellites transmit radio signals to mobile receivers which determine their distances from at least four satellites and estimate their positions. By utilizing this user-centric architecture, GPS can scale across a large area and use a limitless number of receivers. In ultrasonic positioning, Kalman filtering is used to measure the distance between the receiver and transmitters.