Design and Performance Evaluation on Ultra-Wideband Time-Of-Arrival 3D Tracking System

A three-dimensional (3D) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Time--of-Arrival (TOA) tracking system has been studied at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) to provide the tracking capability inside the International Space Station (ISS) modules for various applications. One of applications is to locate and report the location where crew experienced possible high level of carbon-dioxide and felt upset. In order to accurately locate those places in a multipath intensive environment like ISS modules, it requires a robust real-time location system (RTLS) which can provide the required accuracy and update rate. A 3D UWB TOA tracking system with two-way ranging has been proposed and studied. The designed system will be tested in the Wireless Habitat Testbed which simulates the ISS module environment. In this presentation, we discuss the 3D TOA tracking algorithm and the performance evaluation based on different tracking baseline configurations. The simulation results show that two configurations of the tracking baseline are feasible. With 100 picoseconds standard deviation (STD) of TOA estimates, the average tracking error 0.2392 feet (about 7 centimeters) can be achieved for configuration Twisted Rectangle while the average tracking error 0.9183 feet (about 28 centimeters) can be achieved for configuration Slightly-Twisted Top Rectangle . The tracking accuracy can be further improved with the improvement of the STD of TOA estimates. With 10 picoseconds STD of TOA estimates, the average tracking error 0.0239 feet (less than 1 centimeter) can be achieved for configuration "Twisted Rectangle".