The use of GPS for indoor positioning poses difficult challenges due to very weak signal levels, and accuracies are typically of the order of tens to hundreds of metres at best. To overcome this severe limitation, Locata Corporation has invented a new positioning technology called Locata, for precision positioning both indoors and outside. Part of the “Locata technology” consists of a time-sync...

This paper presents a practical feedback controller design of a ball screw-driven table system for the microdisplacement positioning. Friction of the mechanism in the micro-displacement region has nonlinear elastic properties, unlike Coulomb and/or viscous friction in the macro-displacement, resulting in different positioning responses and frequency characteristics of the plant depending on the...

We propose a novel method for positioning a mobile robot in an outdoor environment using lasers and optical sensors. Position estimation via a noncontact optical method is useful because the information from the wheel odometer and the global positioning system in a mobile robot is unreliable in some situations. Contact optical sensors such as a computer mouse are designed to be in contact with ...

The wide spread of the 802.11-based wireless technology brings about a good opportunity for the indoor positioning system. In this paper, we present a new 802.11-based indoor positioning method using support vector regression (SVR), which consists of offline training stage and online location stage.Themodel that describes the relations between the position and the received signal strength (RSS)...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology was originally invented for military uses. From 1980s, commercial RFID products started to be available and they were mainly applied in areas of supply chains, transport, manufacturing, personnel access, animal tagging, toll collection etc. Nowadays, RFID has been recognised as an emerging technology for ubiquitous positioning (UP), especially in...

This paper proposes a novel personnel positioning scheme for a tunnel network with blind areas, which compared with most existing schemes offers both low-cost and high-precision. Based on the data models of tunnel networks, measurement networks and mobile miners, the global positioning method is divided into four steps: (1) calculate the real time personnel location in local areas using a locat...

During recent years, the medium-low speed maglev system brings new chances for the development of maglev train related techniques, and traditional operation and control standards have been applied in its signal system design. However, as there are no wheel sets on maglev train, the positioning function cannot be realized by the corresponding method in wheel-rail based urban rail transit. Many r...

We consider the problem of autonomously locating a number of asynchronous sensor nodes in a wireless network. A strong focus lies on reducing the processing resources needed to solve the relative positioning problem, an issue of great interest in resourceconstrained wireless sensor networks. In the first part of the paper, based on a well-known derivation of the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the a...

A hybrid positioning system is merely one in which multiple systems are used for positioning purposes. This virtually always, though not necessarily, includes Global Positioning System (GPS) as it is the only global positioning network currently. Combination of mobile network and GPS positioning techniques provide a higher accuracy of mobile location than positions based on a standalone GPS or ...