Demo Abstract: SurePoint: Exploiting Ultra Wideband Flooding and Diversity to Provide Robust, Scalable, High-Fidelity Indoor Localization

We present SurePoint, a system for drop-in, high-fidelity indoor localization. SurePoint builds on recently available commercial ultrawideband radio hardware. While ultra-wideband radios provide a pairwise range estimate natively, we show that with the addition of frequency and spatial diversity, we can achieve a 53% decrease in median range error. Because this extra diversity requires many additional packets for each range estimate, we leverage an efficient broadcast ranging protocol for localization that ameliorates this overhead. In stationary and fast-moving environments SurePoint achieves up to 0.08 m median error and 0.53 m 99th percentile error. As ranging requires the tag to have exclusive access to the channel, we employ a protocol to coordinate the localization of multiple tags in space. This protocol builds on recent work exploiting the constructive interference phenomenon, however SurePoint is the first to demonstrate constructive interface using the 802.15.4a ultrawideband PHY. Finally, as the ranging protocol requires careful management of the ultra-wideband radio and tight timing, we utilize TriPoint, a dedicated “drop-in” ranging module that provides a simple I2C interface. We show that this additional microcontroller demands only marginal energy overhead while facilitating interoperability by freeing the primary microcontroller to handle other tasks. This demo complements the paper “SurePoint: Exploiting Ultra Wideband Flooding and Diversity to Provide Robust, Scalable, HighFidelity Indoor Localization” to be presented at SenSys’16.