Localization of a Target with Three Degrees of Freedom Using a Low Cost Wireless Infrared Sensor Network

The estimation of the position of a mobile target on a plane as well as its orientation is an important aspect for many applications. The indoor or outdoor localization of such a target has been widely addressed in the literature but if a third degree of freedom like rotation has to be also taken into consideration the difficulty in estimating the target position and orientation is significantly increased. A network consisting of only a small number of low cost infrared transmitters/receivers is used in this paper to estimate the position of a mobile target on a plane as well as its draft orientation with an angular step of 45o or less. The distance and orienta-tion estimation is based on the success rate that infrared patterns are retrieved at the target. This success rate parameter is calculated by simple ultra low cost microcontrollers. The architectural complexity and cost of the overall localization system is significantly lower than other approaches without sacrificing speed and ac-curacy. An error correction scheme like Turbo decoding is applied in order to increase the reliability and sta-bility of the results by correcting burst errors introduced by real time noise