Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Publication
    DecaWave ultra-wideband warm-up error correction
    ( 2021)
    Sidorenko, Juri
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    Hugentobler, Urs
    In the field of indoor localization, ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is no longer dispensable. The market demands that the UWB hardware has to be cheap, precise and accurate. These requirements lead to the popularity of the DecaWave UWB system. The great majority of the publications about this system deals with the correction of the signal power, hardware delay or clock drift. It has traditionally been assumed that this error only appears at the beginning of the operation and is caused by the warm-up process of the crystal. In this article, we show that the warm-up error is influenced by the same error source as the signal power. To our knowledge, no scientific publication has explicitly examined the warm-up error before. This work aims to close this gap and, moreover, to present a solution which does not require any external measuring equipment and only has to be carried out once. It is shown that the empirically obtained warm-up correction curve increases the accuracy for the twoway- ranging (TWR) significantly.
  • Publication
    The MODISSA testbed: A multi-purpose platform for the prototypical realization of vehicle-related applications using optical sensors
    We present the current state of development of the sensor-equipped car MODISSA, with which Fraunhofer IOSB realizes a configurable experimental platform for hardware evaluation and software development in the context of mobile mapping and vehicle-related safety and protection. MODISSA is based on a van that has successively been equipped with a variety of optical sensors over the past few years, and contains hardware for complete raw data acquisition, georeferencing, real-time data analysis, and immediate visualization on in-car displays. We demonstrate the capabilities of MODISSA by giving a deeper insight into experiments with its specific configuration in the scope of three different applications. Other research groups can benefit from these experiences when setting up their own mobile sensor system, especially regarding the selection of hardware and software, the knowledge of possible sources of error, and the handling of the acquired sensor data.
  • Publication
    TUM-MLS-2016: An Annotated Mobile LiDAR Dataset of the TUM City Campus for Semantic Point Cloud Interpretation in Urban Areas
    ( 2020)
    Zhu, Jingwei
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    Huang , Rong
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    Hoegner, Ludwig
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    Zhenghao, Sun
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    XU, Yusheng
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    Stilla, Uwe
    In the past decade, a vast amount of strategies, methods, and algorithms have been developed to explore the semantic interpretation of 3D point clouds for extracting desirable information. To assess the performance of the developed algorithms or methods, public standard benchmark datasets should invariably be introduced and used, which serve as an indicator and ruler in the evaluation and comparison. In this work, we introduce and present large-scale Mobile LiDAR point clouds acquired at the city campus of the Technical University of Munich, which have been manually annotated and can be used for the evaluation of related algorithms and methods for semantic point cloud interpretation. We created three datasets from a measurement campaign conducted in April 2016, including a benchmark dataset for semantic labeling, test data for instance segmentation, and test data for annotated single 360 ° laser scans. These datasets cover an urban area of approximately 1 km long roadways and include more than 40 million annotated points with eight classes of objects labeled. Moreover, experiments were carried out with results from several baseline methods compared and analyzed, revealing the quality of this dataset and its effectiveness when using it for performance evaluation.
  • Publication
    Self-Calibration for the Time-of-Arrival Positioning
    Self-calibration of time-of-arrival positioning systems is made difficult by the non-linearity of the relevant set of equations. This work applies dimension lifting to this problem. The objective function is extended by an additional dimension to allow the dynamics of the optimization to avoid local minima. Next to the usual numerical optimization, a partially analytical method is suggested, which makes the system of equations overdetermined proportionally to the number of measurements. Results with the lifted objective function are compared to those with the unmodified objective function. For evaluation purposes, the fractions of convergence to local minima are determined, for both synthetic data with random geometrical constellations and real measurements with a reasonable constellation of base stations. It is shown that the lifted objective function provides improved convergence in all cases, often significantly so.
  • Publication
    Self-Calibration for the Time Difference of Arrival Positioning
    The time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) self-calibration is an important topic for many applications, such as indoor navigation. One of the most common methods is to perform nonlinear optimization. Unfortunately, optimization often gets stuck in a local minimum. Here, we propose a method of dimension lifting by adding an additional variable into the l2 norm of the objective function. Next to the usual numerical optimization, a partially-analytical method is suggested, which overdetermines the system of equations proportionally to the number of measurements. The effect of dimension lifting on the TDOA self-calibration is verified by experiments with synthetic and real measurements. In both cases, self-calibration is performed for two very common and often combined localization systems, the DecaWave Ultra-Wideband (UWB) and the Abatec Local Position Measurement (LPM) system. The results show that our approach significantly reduces the risk of becoming trapped in a local minimum.
  • Publication
    Error corrections for ultra-wideband ranging
    ( 2020)
    Sidorenko, Juri
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    ; ; ;
    Hugentobler, Urs
    Precise indoor localization is a major challenge in the field of localization. In this work we investigate multiple error corrections for the ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, in particular the DecaWave DW1000 transceiver. Both the time-of-arrival (TOA) and the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) methods are considered. Various clock-drift correction methods for TOA from the literature are reviewed and compared experimentally. The best performing method is extended to TDOA, corrections for the signal power dependence and the hardware delay are added, and two additional enhancements suggested. These are compared to each other and to TOA in positioning experiments.
  • Publication
    Unique 4-DOF Relative Pose Estimation with Six Distances for UWB/V-SLAM-Based Devices
    ( 2019)
    Molina Martel, Francisco
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    Sidorenko, Juri
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    Hugentobler, Urs
    In this work we introduce a relative localization method that estimates the coordinate frame transformation between two devices based on distance measurements. We present a linear algorithm that calculates the relative pose in 2D or 3D with four degrees of freedom (4-DOF). This algorithm needs a minimum of five or six distance measurements, respectively, to estimate the relative pose uniquely. We use the linear algorithm in conjunction with outlier detection algorithms and as a good initial estimate for iterative least squares refinement. The proposed method outperforms other related linear methods in terms of distance measurements needed and in terms of accuracy. In comparison with a related linear algorithm in 2D, we can reduce 10% of the translation error. In contrast to the more general 6-DOF linear algorithm, our 4-DOF method reduces the minimum distances needed from ten to six and the rotation error by a factor of four at the standard deviation of our ultra-wideband (UWB) transponders. When using the same amount of measurements the orientation error and translation error are approximately reduced to a factor of ten. We validate our method with simulations and an experimental setup, where we integrate ultra-wideband (UWB) technology into simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)-based devices. The presented relative pose estimation method is intended for use in augmented reality applications for cooperative localization with head-mounted displays. We foresee practical use cases of this method in cooperative SLAM, where map merging is performed in the most proactive manner.