Positioning using ZigBee and Ultrasound

To find a location, GPS has been wildly used. But, it is hard to use in indoor because of very weak signal level. To meet indoor requirements, there have been many studies applying wireless communication networks such as WLAN, UWB and ZigBee. Among these, ZigBee is widely adopted in many WSN applications because it has an advantage of low-power and low-cost. In ZigBee, the RSSI is used as range measurement for ad-hoc network. The RSSI are converted to ranges using the signal attenuation model and these ranges become inputs of positioning methods. The obtained position with RSSI has large error because of its poor accuracy. To overcome this problem, ultrasonic sensors are added in many researches. By measuring the arrival time difference of ZigBee and ultrasound as a range measurement, the precise position can be found. However, there are still many problems: scheduling of beacons to transmit signals in a correct order, addition and synchronization of beacons and low-rate positioning rate. At this paper, an efficient method to solve these problems is proposed. In the proposed method, a node transmits ZigBee and ultrasound signal simultaneously. And beacons find the range with the received signals and send it back to a node with ZigBee. The position is computed in a node with the received ranges. In addition, a new positioning algorithm to solve the risk of the divergence in the linearization method and the singularity problem in the Savarese method is presented. Both static and dynamic experimental results show 0.02m RMS errors with high output rate.