A Novel Ultra-Wideband Hybrid Localization Scheme in Coal Mine

—This paper addresses the problem of the roadway environment and Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) propagation on localization accuracy in coal mine. Unlike prior localization algorithms, reference nodes are deployed according to the actual environment in coal mine, and Time-of-Arrival (TOA) and Receive Signal Strength (RSS) measurements using UltraWideband (UWB) signals are combined to obtain better localization accuracy. A two-step method is proposed to estimate the object location, which uses RSS data first to calculate the range of target position, and TOA data is combined to get the object precise location by data fusion. Then analytical expressions for the probability of detection and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for this scheme and TOA method are given for comparison. Detailed simulation experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of this proposed method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods perform better than traditional TOA measurements based on UWB signals.