Toward the implementation of a universal angle-based optical indoor positioning system

Abstract

There is an emerging market today for indoor positioning systems capable of working alongside global navigation satellite systems, such as the global positioning system, in indoor environments. Many systems have been proposed in the literature but all of them have fundamental flaws that hold them back from widescale implementation. We review angle-of-arrival (AOA) and angle-difference-of-arrival (ADOA) optical indoor positioning systems which have been proven to be robust, accurate, and easily implementable. We build an AOA/ADOA optical indoor positioning system out of a simple commercial high-speed camera and white light light emitting diodes (LEDs) which operate over a working area of 1 m³, and compare its performance to other indoor positioning methods. The AOA and ADOA systems achieve positioning with low errors of 1.2 and 3.7 cm, respectively.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

angle-of-arrival (AOA) / angle-difference-of-arrival (ADOA) / indoor positioning / optical positioning

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Mark H. Bergen received his B.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in 2014 and his M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2016. He is currently working towards his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He has published several papers on indoor optical positioning and currently works in terahertz free space optical communications.

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Ferdinand S. Schaal received his B.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 2017. He is currently working towards his M.A.Sc. degree in Digital Media Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. He wrote his Bachelor’s thesis at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in 2017 on indoor optical positioning.

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Richard Klukas holds his B.Sc. and M.Sc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Geomatics Engineering, all from the University of Calgary. Dr. Klukas is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus (UBC). Prior to UBC, he held faculty positions at the University of Calgary and Okanagan University College. He has industrial experience with Nortel and Cell-Loc Inc., a high-tech company which commercialized his PhD work. During his tenure at Cell-Loc Inc., Dr. Klukas was the Director of Research and the General Manager of the company’s U.S. office in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Klukas has written numerous papers on wireless positioning and holds four patents in that area. He is a registered, professional engineer in British Columbia.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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Julian Cheng received the B.Eng. degree (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, in 1995, the M.Sc.(Eng.) degree in Mathematics and Engineering from Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, in 2003. He is currently a Full Professor in the School of Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, Canada. He was with Bell Northern Research and NORTEL Networks. His current research interests include digital communications over fading channels, statistical signal processing for wireless applications, optical wireless communications, and 5G wireless networks. He was the Co-Chair of the 12th Canadian Workshop on Information Theory in 2011, the 28th Biennial Symposium on Communications in 2016, and the 6th EAI International Conference on Game Theory for Networks (GameNets 216). He currently serves as an Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and he was a past Associate Editor of the IEEE Trsactions on Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Communications Letters, and the IEEE Access. Dr. Cheng served as a Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on Optical Wireless Communications. He is also a Registered Professional Engineer with the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Currently he serves as the President of the Canadian Society of Information Theory.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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Jonathan F. Holzman received a B.Sc. degree in Engineering Physics and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta, in Canada, in 1998 and 2003, respectively. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, over 2004 and 2005. He joined the University of British Columbia in 2006 and is now the group leader of the Integrated Optics Laboratory at this university. The group develops photonics technology for the integration and application of terahertz and optical wireless systems. He has published 71 journal articles and 73 conference proceedings, and he was awarded the 2017 Engineers Canada Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education.

E-mail: [e-mail]

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and Western Economic Diversification Canada.

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