To ensure safety in confined environments such as mines or subway tunnels, a (wireless) sensor network can be deployed to monitor various environmental conditions. One of its most important applications is to track personnel, mobile equipment, and vehicles. However, the state-of-the-art algorithms assume that the positions of the sensors are perfectly known, which is not necessarily true due to imprecise placement and or dropping of sensors. Therefore, we propose an automatic approach for simultaneous refinement of sensors' positions and target tracking. We divide the considered area in a finite number of cells, define dynamic and measurement models, and apply a discrete variant of belief propagation that can efficiently solve this high-dimensional problem and handle all non-Gaussian uncertainties expected in this kind of environment. Finally, we use ray-tracing simulation to generate an artificial mine-like environment and generate synthetic measurement data. According to our extensive simulation study, the proposed approach performs significantly better than standard Bayesian target tracking and localization algorithms and provides robustness against outliers.
Finally, the results of the measurement campaign @cite_36 , carried out in a basement tunnel of Link "oping university and an iron-ore mine in Kiruna, Sweden, indicated that UWB time-of-arrival (TOA) allows very accurate ranging in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios caused by thin obstacles. However, if the direct path is blocked by a thick tunnel wall, the TOA-based ranging leads to a relatively large bias. Moreover, the analysis showed that NLOS conditions cannot be accurately discriminated from LOS conditions, which means that (Bayesian) soft-decision algorithms are required for accurate ranging and positioning in these environments. The previously described state-of-the-art algorithms assume that the positions of the sensors are perfectly known, which is not necessarily the case due to imprecise placement and or sensor drops caused by vibrations or wall collapses. Although probably not available in confined environments nowadays, we also envision that uncertain sensors' positions can be an outcome of some (cooperative) sensor network localization algorithm @cite_31 @cite_41 . One possible solution to this problem is to manually and periodically verify that the sensors positions are correct. However, this approach may be too costly and even infeasible in some areas due to the on-going activities.
@cite_36 @cite_41 @cite_31
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A robust and accurate positioning solution is required to increase the safety in GPS-denied environments. Although there is a lot of available research in this area, little has been done for confined environments such as tunnels. Therefore, we organized a measurement campaign in a basement tunnel of Linkoping university, in which we obtained ultra-wideband (UWB) complex impulse responses for line-of-sight (LOS), and three non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios. This paper is focused on time-of-arrival (TOA) ranging since this technique can provide the most accurate range estimates, which are required for range-based positioning. We describe the measurement setup and procedure, select the threshold for TOA estimation, analyze the channel propagation parameters obtained from the power delay profile (PDP), and provide statistical model for ranging. According to our results, the rise-time should be used for NLOS identification, and the maximum excess delay should be used for NLOS error mitigation. However, the NLOS condition cannot be perfectly determined, so the distance likelihood has to be represented in a Gaussian mixture form. We also compared these results with measurements from a mine tunnel, and found a similar behavior. The location of people, mobile terminals and equipment is highly desirable for operational enhancements in the mining industry. In an indoor environment such as a mine, the multipath caused by reflection, diffraction and diffusion on the rough sidewall surfaces, and the non-line of sight (NLOS) due to the blockage of the shortest direct path between transmitter and receiver are the main sources of range measurement errors. Unreliable measurements of location metrics such as received signal strengths (RSS), angles of arrival (AOA) and times of arrival (TOA) or time differences of arrival (TDOA), result in the deterioration of the positioning performance. Hence, alternatives to the traditional parametric geolocation techniques have to be considered. In this paper, we present a novel method for mobile station location using wideband channel measurement results applied to an artificial neural network (ANN). The proposed system, the wide band neural network-locate (WBNN-locate), learns off-line the location 'signatures' from the extracted location-dependent features of the measured channel impulse responses for line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) situations. It then matches on-line the observation received from a mobile station against the learned set of 'signatures' to accurately locate its position. The location accuracy of the proposed system, applied in an underground mine, has been found to be 2 meters for 90 and 80 of trained and untrained data, respectively. Moreover, the proposed system may also be applicable to any other indoor situation and particularly in confined environments with characteristics similar to those of a mine (e.g. rough sidewalls surface). Localizing people in confined and underground areas is one of the topics under research in mining labs and industries. The position of personnel and equipments in areas such as mines is of high importance because it improves industrial safety and security. Due to the special nature of underground environments, signals transmitted in a mine gallery tunnel suffer from severe multipath effects caused by reflection, refraction, diffraction and collision with humid rough surfaces. In such cases and in cases where the signals are blocked due to the non-line of sight (NLOS) regions, traditional localization techniques based on the RSS, AOA and TOA TDOA lead to high position estimation errors. One of the proposed solutions to such challenging situations is based on extracting channel impulse response (CIR) fingerprints with reference to one wireless receiver and using an artificial neural network as a matching algorithm to localize. In this article we study this approach in a multiple access network where multiple access points are present. The diversity of the collected fingerprints will allow us to create artificial neural networks that will work separately or cooperatively using the same localization technique. The results will show that using cooperative artificial intelligence in the presence of multiple signatures from different reference points improves significantly the accuracy, precision, scalability and the overall performance of the localization system. Assume that n sensors with identical range r = f(n) 2n, for some f(n) > 1 for all n, are thrown randomly and independently with the uniform distribution in the unit interval [0,1]. They are required to move to new positions so as to cover the entire unit interval in the sense that every point in the interval is within the range of a sensor. We obtain tradeoffs between the expected sum and maximum of displacements of the sensors and their range required to accomplish this task. In particular, when f(n) = 1 the expected total displacement is shown to be Θ(√n). For sensors with larger ranges we present two algorithms that prove the upper bound for the sum drops sharply as f(n) increases. The first of these holds for f(n) ≥ 6 and shows the total movement of the sensors is O ( √In n (n)) while the second holds for 12 ≤ f(n) ≤ In n - 2 In In n and gives an upper bound of O(ln n f(n)ef(n) 2 ). Note that the second algorithm improves upon the first for f(n) δ In In n - In In Inn. Further we show a lower bound, for any 1 ω f(n) 0. For the case of the expected maximum displacement of a sensor when f(n) = 1 our bounds are (n -1 2) and for any e > 0, O(n-1 2+e). For larger sensor ranges (up to (1 - e)ln n n e > O) the expected maximum displacement is shown to be Θ(ln n n). We also obtain similar sum and maximum displacement and range tradeoffs for area coverage for sensors thrown at random in a unit square. In this case, for the expected maximum displacement our bounds are tight and for the expected sum they are within a factor of √ln n. Finally, we investigate the related problem of the expected total and maximum displacement for perimeter coverage (whereby only the perimeter of the region need be covered) of a unit square. For example, when n sensors of radius > 2 n are thrown randomly and independently with the uniform distribution in the interior of a unit square, we can show the total expected displacement required to cover the perimeter is n 12 + o(n). © 2013 ACM.