Due to their large bandwidth, relatively low cost, and robust performance, uwb radio chips can be used for a wide variety of applications, including localization, communication, and radar. This article offers an exhaustive survey of recent progress in uwb radar technology. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive view of the technical fundamentals and emerging trends in uwb radar. Our analysis is categorized into multiple parts. Firstly, we explore the fundamental concepts of uwb radar technology from a technology and standardization point of view. Secondly, we examine the most relevant UWB applications and use cases, such as device-free localization, activity recognition, presence detection, and vital sign monitoring, discussing each time the bandwidth requirements, processing techniques, algorithms, latest developments, relevant example papers, and trends. Next, we steer readers toward relevant datasets and available radio chipsets. Finally, we discuss ongoing challenges and potential future research avenues. As such, this overview paper is designed to be a cornerstone reference for researchers charting the course of uwb radar technology over the last decade.

Nonline-of-sight (NLoS) propagation condition is a crucial factor affecting the precision of the localization in the ultra-wideband (UWB) indoor positioning system (IPS). Numerous supervised machine learning (ML) approaches have been applied for the NLoS identification to improve the accuracy of the IPS. However, it is difficult for existing ML approaches to maintain a high classification accuracy when the database contains a small number of NLoS signals and a large number of line-of-sight (LoS) signals. The inaccurate localization of the target node caused by this small number of NLoS signals can still be problematic. To solve this issue, we propose feature-based Gaussian distribution (GD) and generalized GD (GGD) NLoS detection algorithms. By employing our detection algorithm for the imbalanced dataset, a classification accuracy of 96.7% and 98.0% can be achieved. We also compared the proposed algorithm with the existing cutting edge, such as support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), naïve Bayes (NB), and neural network (NN), which can achieve an accuracy of 92.6%, 92.8%, 93.2%, and 95.5%, respectively. The results demonstrate that the GGD algorithm can achieve high classification accuracy with the imbalanced dataset. Finally, the proposed algorithm can also achieve a higher classification accuracy for different ratios of LoS and NLoS signals, which proves the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Indoor localization knows many applications, such as industry 4.0, warehouses, healthcare, drones, etc., where high accuracy becomes more critical than ever. Recent advances in ultra-wideband localization systems allow high accuracies for multiple active users in line-of-sight environments, while they still introduce errors above 300 mm in non-line-of-sight environments due to multi-path effects. Current work tries to improve the localization accuracy of ultra-wideband through offline error correction approaches using popular machine learning techniques. However, these techniques are still limited to simple environments with few multi-path effects and focus on offline correction. With the upcoming demand for high accuracy and low latency indoor localization systems, there is a need to deploy (online) efficient error correction techniques with fast response times in dynamic and complex environments. To address this, we propose (i) a novel semi-supervised autoencoder-based machine learning approach for improving ranging accuracy of ultra-wideband localization beyond the limitations of current improvements while aiming for performance improvements and a small memory footprint and (ii) an edge inference architecture for online UWB ranging error correction. As such, this paper allows the design of accurate localization systems by using machine learning for low-cost edge devices. Compared to a deep neural network (as state-of-the-art, with a baseline error of 75 mm) the proposed autoencoder achieves a 29% higher accuracy. The proposed approach leverages robust and accurate ultra-wideband localization, which reduces the errors from 214 mm without correction to 58 mm with correction. Validation of edge inference using the proposed autoencoder on a NVIDIA Jetson Nano demonstrates significant uplink bandwidth savings and allows up to 20 rapidly ranging anchors per edge GPU.

A thorough analysis of sports is becoming increasingly important during the training process of badminton players at both the recreational and professional level. Nowadays, game situations are usually filmed and reviewed afterwards in order to analyze the game situation, but these video set-ups tend to be difficult to analyze, expensive, and intrusive to set up. In contrast, we classified badminton movements using off-the-shelf accelerometer and gyroscope data. To this end, we organized a data capturing campaign and designed a novel neural network using different frame sizes as input. This paper shows that with only accelerometer data, our novel convolutional neural network is able to distinguish nine activities with 86% precision when using a sampling frequency of 50 Hz. Adding the gyroscope data causes an increase of up to 99% precision, as compared to, respectively, 79% and 88% when using a traditional convolutional neural network. In addition, our paper analyses the impact of different sensor placement options and discusses the impact of different sampling frequenciess of the sensors. As such, our approach provides a low cost solution that is easy to use and can collect useful information for the analysis of a badminton game.

Ultra wideband (UWB) is a popular technology to address the need for high-precision indoor positioning systems in challenging industry 4.0 use cases. In line-of-sight (LOS) environments, UWB positioning errors in the order of 1–10 cm can be achieved. However, in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, this precision drops significantly, with errors typically >30 cm. Machine learning (ML) has been proposed to improve the precision in such NLOS conditions, but is typically environment-specific and lacks generalization to new environments and UWB configurations. As such, it is necessary to collect large data sets to train a neural network (NN) for each new environment or UWB configuration. To remedy this, this article proposes automatic optimizations for transfer learning (TL) deep NNs toward new environments and UWB configurations. We analyze error correction and (N)LOS classification models, using either feature- or channel impulse response (CIR)-based input data. Our TL solutions show a 50% error improvement and 15% (N)LOS classification accuracy improvement (for both feature- and CIR-based approaches) compared to a model trained in a different environment. We also analyze the impact on TL using a limited number of samples (25 to 400 samples). The highest accuracy is typically achieved by the CIR-based approach, where with only 50 samples from the new mixed (N)LOS environment, we show ±10 cm precision after error correction with 93% (N)LOS detection. The presented results demonstrate high-precision UWB localization (from 643 to 245 mm) through ML with minimal data collection effort in challenging NLOS environments.