Harmonium: Ultra Wideband Pulse Generation with Bandstitched Recovery for Fast, Accurate, and Robust Indoor Localization

We introduce Harmonium , a novel ultra wideband (UWB) RF localization architecture that achieves decimeter-scale accuracy indoors. Harmonium strikes a balance between tag simplicity and processing complexity to provide fast and accurate indoor location estimates. Harmonium uses only commodity components and consists of a small, inexpensive, lightweight, and FCC-compliant UWB transmitter or tag , fixed infrastructure anchors with known locations, and centralized processing that calculates the tag’s position. Anchors employ a new frequency-stepped narrowband receiver architecture that rejects narrowband interferers and extracts high-resolution timing information without the cost or complexity of traditional UWB approaches. In a complex indoor environment, 90% of position estimates obtained with Harmonium exhibit less than 31 cm of error with an average of 9 cm of inter-sample noise. In non-line-of-sight conditions (i.e., through-wall), 90% of position error is less than 42 cm. The tag draws 75 mW when actively transmitting, or 3.9 mJ per location fix at the 19 Hz update rate. Tags weigh 3 g and cost $4.50 USD at modest volumes. Furthermore, VLSI-based design concepts are identified for a simple, low-power realization of the Harmonium tag to offer a roadmap for the realization of Harmonium concepts in future integrated systems. Harmonium introduces a new design point for indoor localization and enables localization of small, fast objects such as micro quadrotors, devices previously restricted to expensive optical motion capture systems.