accurate indoor/outdoor positioning using UWB for the ardupilot

[Samuel van de velde]

Hello everyone, 

I'm Samuel from Pozyx and we are running a kickstarter campaign for our ultrawideband (UWB) positioning platform.

One of our backers is Chris Anderson from DIYdrones who asked if we could make our platform work with the ardupilot.

At pozyx we know the ardupilot but haven't worked with it before. So my question is, how would be the best way to make pozyx work with the ardupilot?

Some more details:

our system uses ultra-wideband, an 9-axis IMU and a pressure sensor to get accurate position and orientation information. All the data is processed on the onboard microcontroller. The board is Arduino compatible and connectable through I2C. In a sense, the board can be seen as a position "sensor". We have an Arduino library to communicate with the board. Also, we will be making an ROS (robotic operating system) driver.

Can this be done for the ardupilot as well: is a driver sufficient and also, where could we find some information about this? 

Thank you for your help!

Samuel

[David Pawlak]

I'd really like to see this working with Ardupilot. Looks very doable. I'm not the one to help here, but have a couple of questions.

What is the outdoor range of the tags, and can more than four be used? For instance to expand the functional area.

[Roberto Navoni]

Hi Samuel ,

Our team Virtualrobotix start to work 2 years ago on this kind of
technology ... we are working at Europear Research progect FP7 this is
the link : http://eiger.eclexys.com/

The technology promising great features but actually there are a lot
of limits on it ... in our desing we mix UWB and GNSS technology so
will be possibile mix outdoor and indoor enviroment and our VRBrain
autopilot and all other APM based flight control could be used it in
indoor and outdoor enviroment without switch the two systems . Could
be nice to work togheter at the integration in our platform.
best
Roberto

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[C Wong]

We've tried uwb in replacement of vicon to solve the optical occlusion problem and the 2 uwb system we tried broken down (like having GPS glitches) due to small space + multipath. Multipath killed sensitivity. That was indoor, 2 yrs ago. Outdoor maybe better, but the infrastructure is a pain compared to rtk.

Look into Decawave, they are still in beta basically, but their tech appears to solve some of those issues.

[Grant Morphett]

Hi Samuel.  I'm Grant the ArduPilot Rover maintainer.  I've only just found out about your sensor and I'm interested to see if we can integrate your sensor into ArduPilot.  I would need to understand what interfaces you have available - is it only I2C?  And of course what the API interface is i.e. what positional information is being passed back over the interface and how its formatted.  Do you have that information available?  Is your source code available?

Thanks, Grant.

[Jonathan Challinger]

Grant,

I'd like to see us add support for the DecaWave DW1000 UWB tranceiver (which is part of a module called DWM1000 that costs ~$20 in low volumes), rather than requiring some $1000 external system that implements a redundant inertial navigation system that is also closed source and likely isn't designed for the vibration environment.

It is a much more difficult task but it is one that I am likely to embark upon soon. If you want to work on it you could grab a DWM1000, solder some wires to it and write a SPI driver for it. That'd be a huge help kickstarting the project...

Randy is ordering some DWM1000s for himself. I have a couple already.

[Jonathan Challinger]

Also Pozyx is just an Arduino attached to that module.

[james pattison]

This might be worth a look:
https://sites.google.com/site/wayneholder/uwb-ranging-with-the-decawave-dwm1000---part-ii