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Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'04)   p. 101
A 3-D Indoor Positioning Method using a Single Compact Base Station
Esko O. Dijk, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands; Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands
C. H. (Kees) van Berkel, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands; Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Ronald M. Aarts, Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Evert J. van Loenen, Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands

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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2004.1276849
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Abstract
Context awareness will become increasingly important in future domestic consumer electronics. In many domestic context aware applications, there is a need for location and orientation information about persons, devices or objects in the home. This information can be provided by a dedicated indoor location system. A consumer location system should be robust, safe, easy to set up, low cost, and should have a minimal infrastructure. In this paper, a step towards consumer location systems is taken by proposing an ultrasonic positioning method that needs just a single compact base station to measure 3D positions of mobile devices in a room. The method employs ultrasound time-of-flight tri-lateration to estimate device positions, using a base station containing an array of three ultrasound transducers. Five potential problems of the proposed method are identified; the main problem being line-of-sight path occlusion. The method has been prototyped, and initial results show an accuracy of 1.41 m or better for 95% of the position estimates, in case of a good line-of-sight path. It is concluded that the method is promising for providing 3D position information at around 1 m accuracy for context aware applications, but that the problem of line-of-sight occlusion requires further investigation.
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Citation:  Esko O. Dijk, C. H. (Kees) van Berkel, Ronald M. Aarts, Evert J. van Loenen, "A 3-D Indoor Positioning Method using a Single Compact Base Station," percom, p. 101,  Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'04),  2004