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This dissertation describes an indoor localization system based on oscillating magnetic fields and the underlying processing architecture. The system consists of several fixed anchor points, generating the magnetic fields (transmitter), and wearable magnetic field measurement units, whose position should be determined (receiver). The system is evaluated in different environments and application areas. Additionally, various fields of application are discussed and assessed in ubiquitous and pervasive computing and Ambient Assisted Living. The fusion of magnetic field-based distance information and positions derived from LIDAR distance measurements is described and evaluated.
The system architecture consists of three layers, a physical layer, a layer for position and distance estimation between a magnetic field transmitter and a receiver, and a layer which uses several measurements to different transmitters to estimate the overall position of a wearable measurement unit.
Each layer covers different aspects which have to be taken care of when magnetic field information is processed. Especially the properties of the generated magnetic field information are considered in the processing algorithms.
The physical layer covers the magnetic field generation and magnetic Field-Based information transfer, synchronization of a transmitter and the receivers and the description of the locally measured magnetic fields on the receiver side. After a transfer of this information to a central processing unit, the hardware specific signal levels are transformed to the levels of the theoretical magnetic field models. The values are then used to estimate candidate positions and distances. Due to symmetrical effects of the magnetic fields, it is only possible to reduce the receiver position to 8 points around the transmitter (one position in each of the octants of the coordinate system). The determined positions have a mean error of 108 cm, the average error of the distance is 40 cm.
On top of this, the distance and position information against different transmitters are fused, this covers clock synchronization of transmitters, triggering and scheduling sequences and distance and position based localization and tracking algorithms. The magnetic-field-based indoor localization system has been evaluated in different applications and environments; the mean position error is 60 cm to 70 cm depending on the environment. A comparison against an RF-based indoor localization system shows the robustness of magnetic fields against RF shadows caused by big metal objects.
We additionally present algorithms for regions of interest detection, working on raw magnetic field information and transformed position and distance information. Setups in larger areas can distinguish regions which are further than 50 cm apart, small scale coil setups (3 transmitters in 2m^3) allow to resolve regions below 20 cm.
In the end, we describe a fusion algorithm for a wearable localization system based on 4 LIDAR distance measurement units and magnetic field-based distance estimation. The magnetic field indoor localization system provides distance proximity information which is used to resolve ambiguous position estimates of the LIDAR system. In a room (8m × 10m), we achieve a mean error of 8 cm.