Geometric Autoconfiguration for Precision Personnel Location

Woodacre, Benjamin W

Etd

Geometric Autoconfiguration for Precision Personnel Location

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The goal of a radio-based precision personnel location system is to determine the position of a mobile user, to within a desired accuracy, based on signals propagated between that user and fixed stations. In emergency response situations such information would assist search and rescue operations and provide improved situational awareness. Fundamentally location estimation is based upon the signal measured at, and the position of, each receiver. In the case of a location system where such receivers are installed on vehicles, such as for fire trucks, no external infrastructure or prior characterization of the area of operations can be assumed and the estimation of the (relative) positions of the receiving stations must be repeated each time the system is deployed at a new site as this results in the geometry of the receiving antennas being changed. This dissertation presents work towards an accurate and automatic method for determination of the geometric configuration of such receiving stations based on sampled frequency data using both a ""classical"" ranging method and a novel technique based on a singular value decomposition method for multilateralization. We also compare the performance of our approaches to the Cramer- Rao bound for total antenna location error for distance and frequency-data based estimators, and provide experimental performance results for these methods tested in real multipath environments.

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