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Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Navigation and Positioning".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2023) | Viewed by 9842

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Center of Digital Safety & Security, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, 1210 Vienna, Austria
Interests: Internet of Things; silicon sensors; integrated sensors; RFID; energy harvesting; embedded systems; edge machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Information Engineering Infrastructures and Sustainable Energy (DIIES), “Mediterranea” University, 89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Interests: indoor positioning; smart sensors; ultrasonic sensors; energy harvesting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The development of emerging technologies enabling Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation paves the way to an exciting broad range of applications.

Accurate information and real-time positioning of users, devices, and robots foster the development of new applications for augmented and mixed reality, human–machine, and home automation gestural interfaces, and navigation in airport, hospital, and shopping centers.

Further fields of application include medicine, such as monitoring elderly people’s movements or rehabilitative exercises; logistics, such as the positioning of goods in warehouses; and sport, such as monitoring body and limb position during training exercises and in game consoles.

Particular interest is dedicated to those environments in which the availability of global satellite navigation systems is denied or challenging or the positioning accuracy is insufficient, such as indoors, in the industrial, commercial, and consumer sectors. In such environments, ultrasound positioning techniques have emerged as the most promising in terms of accuracy and reliability.

This Special Issue aims to gather contributions on sensors for positioning exploiting ultrasound technology. Furthermore, the scope of this Special Issue covers also sensing and processing methods applied to the navigation problem. These include robust numerical methods, optimization strategies, tracking algorithms, machine learning, and performance characterization and validation methods.

At present, the research effort needs to be directed to new algorithms, architectures, and sensor technologies to improve coverage, power consumption, size, and to increase spatial and temporal resolution of ultrasonic positioning and navigation systems, taking into account the physical and economic constraints of the various applications.

In this framework, it is our pleasure to edit this Special Issue on “Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation". Original contributions focused on systems and technologies to enable the applications listed above are welcome.

Dr. Massimo Merenda
Prof. Dr. Riccardo Carotenuto
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • indoor positioning
  • ultrasound positioning sensors and systems
  • acoustic emitters and sensors for positioning
  • positioning systems and infrastructures
  • positioning algorithms and strategies
  • machine learning for positioning
  • tracking
  • ultrasound navigation
  • navigation systems and infrastructures
  • navigation algorithms and strategies

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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20 pages, 51475 KiB  
Article
Modified FMCW Scheme for Improved Ultrasonic Positioning and Ranging of Unmanned Ground Vehicles at Distances < 50 mm
by Stefano Laureti, Marco Mercuri, David A. Hutchins, Felice Crupi and Marco Ricci
Sensors 2022, 22(24), 9899; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22249899 - 15 Dec 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2209
Abstract
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) find extensive use in various applications, including that within industrial environments. Efforts have been made to develop cheap, portable, and light-ranging/positioning systems to accurately locate their absolute/relative position and to automatically avoid potential obstacles and/or collisions with other drones. [...] Read more.
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) find extensive use in various applications, including that within industrial environments. Efforts have been made to develop cheap, portable, and light-ranging/positioning systems to accurately locate their absolute/relative position and to automatically avoid potential obstacles and/or collisions with other drones. To this aim, a promising solution is the use of ultrasonic systems, which can be set up on UGVs and can potentially output a precise reconstruction of the drone’s surroundings. In this framework, a so-called frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) scheme is widely employed as a distance estimator. However, this technique suffers from low repeatability and accuracy at ranges of less than 50 mm when used in combination with low-resource hardware and commercial narrowband transducers, which is a distance range of the utmost importance to avoid potential collisions and/or imaging UGV surroundings. We hereby propose a modified FMCW-based scheme using an ad hoc time-shift of the reference signal. This was shown to improve performance at ranges below 50 mm while leaving the signal unaltered at greater distances. The capabilities of the modified FMCW were evaluated numerically and experimentally. A dramatic enhancement in performance was found for the proposed FMCW with respect to its standard counterpart, which is very close to that of the correlation approach. This work paves the way for the future use of FMCWs in applications requiring high precision. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation)
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30 pages, 12303 KiB  
Article
Smartphone-Based Social Distance Detection Technology with Near-Ultrasonic Signal
by Naizheng Jia, Haoran Shu, Xinheng Wang, Bowen Xu, Yuzhang Xi, Can Xue, Youming Liu and Zhi Wang
Sensors 2022, 22(19), 7345; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22197345 - 27 Sep 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2399
Abstract
With the emergence of COVID-19, social distancing detection is a crucial technique for epidemic prevention and control. However, the current mainstream detection technology cannot obtain accurate social distance in real-time. To address this problem, this paper presents a first study on smartphone-based social [...] Read more.
With the emergence of COVID-19, social distancing detection is a crucial technique for epidemic prevention and control. However, the current mainstream detection technology cannot obtain accurate social distance in real-time. To address this problem, this paper presents a first study on smartphone-based social distance detection technology based on near-ultrasonic signals. Firstly, according to auditory characteristics of the human ear and smartphone frequency response characteristics, a group of 18 kHz–23 kHz inaudible Chirp signals accompanied with single frequency signals are designed to complete ranging and ID identification in a short time. Secondly, an improved mutual ranging algorithm is proposed by combining the cubic spline interpolation and a two-stage search to obtain robust mutual ranging performance against multipath and NLoS affect. Thirdly, a hybrid channel access protocol is proposed consisting of Chirp BOK, FDMA, and CSMA/CA to increase the number of concurrencies and reduce the probability of collision. The results show that in our ranging algorithm, 95% of the mutual ranging error within 5 m is less than 10 cm and gets the best performance compared to the other traditional methods in both LoS and NLoS. The protocol can efficiently utilize the limited near-ultrasonic channel resources and achieve a high refresh rate ranging under the premise of reducing the collision probability. Our study can realize high-precision, high-refresh-rate social distance detection on smartphones and has significant application value during an epidemic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation)
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Review

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33 pages, 3814 KiB  
Review
An Overview of Indoor Localization System for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) in Healthcare
by Luigi Bibbò, Riccardo Carotenuto and Francesco Della Corte
Sensors 2022, 22(21), 8119; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22218119 - 23 Oct 2022
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4308
Abstract
The number of older people needing healthcare is a growing global phenomenon. The assistance in long-term care comprises a complex of medical, nursing, rehabilitation, and social assistance services. The cost is substantial, but technology can help reduce spending by ensuring efficient health services [...] Read more.
The number of older people needing healthcare is a growing global phenomenon. The assistance in long-term care comprises a complex of medical, nursing, rehabilitation, and social assistance services. The cost is substantial, but technology can help reduce spending by ensuring efficient health services and improving the quality of life. Advances in artificial intelligence, wireless communication systems, and nanotechnology allow the creation of intelligent home care systems avoiding hospitalization with evident cost containment. They are capable of ensuring functions of recognition of activities, monitoring of vital functions, and tracking. However, it is essential to also have information on location in order to be able to promptly intervene in case of unforeseen events or assist people in carrying out activities in order to avoid incorrect behavior. In addition, the automatic detection of physical activities performed by human subjects is identified as human activity recognition (HAR). This work presents an overview of the positioning system as part of an integrated HAR system. Lastly, this study contains each technology’s concepts, features, accuracy, advantages, and limitations. With this work, we want to highlight the relationship between HAR and the indoor positioning system (IPS), which is poorly documented in the literature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ultrasonic Positioning and Navigation)
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